Spanish literature

The period of Islamic rule in Iberia from 711 to 1492 brought many new literary traditions to Spain. Most literature at this time was produced in standard Arabic, though poetry and other forms of literature of the Jewish golden age found expression in Judeo-Arabic or Hebrew. Maimonides, for example, wrote his magnum opus The Guide for the Perplexed in Arabic with Hebrew script.

Other major literary figures of the time include Ibn Arabi, Al-Mu'tamid ibn Abbad, Ibn al-Khatib, Ibn Zaydún and Hafsa Bint al-Hajj al-Rukuniyya.

Important literary styles include the muwashah, maqama, and nawba.

Important works include Hadith Bayad wa Riyad and The Incoherence of the Incoherence.

The earliest recorded examples of a vernacular Romance-based literature date from the same time and location, the rich mix of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian cultures in Muslim Spain, in which Maimonides, Averroes, and others worked. The Jarchas, dating from the 9th to the 12th centuries C.E., were short poems spoken in local colloquial Hispano-Romance dialects, known as Mozarabic, but written in Arabic script. The Jarchas appeared at the end of longer poetry written in Arabic or Hebrew known as muwashshah, which were lengthy glosses on the ideas expressed in the jarchas. Typically spoken in the voice of a woman, the jarchas express the anxieties of love, particularly of its loss.

This combination of Hispano-Romance expression with Arabic script, only discovered in 1948, locates the rise of a Spanish literary tradition in the cultural heterogeneity that characterized Medieval Spanish society and politics. However, the Mozarabic language of the Jarchas appears to be a separate Romance language whose evolution from Vulgar Latin paralleled that of Castilian Spanish rather than deriving from or fusing into the latter. Hence, while the relatively recent discovery of the Jarchas challenges pride of chronological place that belonged for so long to the Poema del Cid (El Cantar de mío Cid) (1140 CE) in the history of Spanish literature, they cannot be seen as a precursor to Spain's great epic poem. What the discovery of the jarchas makes clear instead is that from its origins, the literature of Spain has arisen out of and born witness to a rich, heterogeneous mix of cultures and languages.[2][3][4]

The Cantar de Mio Cid is the oldest preserved Spanish cantar de gesta

The epic poem Cantar de Mio Cid was written about a real man—his battles, conquests, and daily life. The poet, name unknown, wrote the epic in about 1140 and Cid supposedly died forty years before in 1099. This epic represents realism, because nothing was exaggerated and the details are very real, even the geography correctly portrays the areas in which Cid traveled and lived. Unlike other European epics, the poem is not idealized and there is no presence of supernatural beings. It has assonance instead of rhyme and its lines vary in length, the most common length being fourteen syllables. This type of verse is known as mester de juglaria (verse form of the minstrels). The epic is divided into three parts, also known as cantos.

Medieval Spanish poets recognized the Mester de Juglaría as a literary form written by the minstrels (juglares) and composed of varying line length and use of assonance instead of rhyme. These poems were sung to uneducated audiences, nobles and peasants alike.

This Castilian narrative poetry known as the Mester de Clerecía became popular in the thirteenth century. It is the verse form of the learned poets, usually clerics (hence the name 'clerecía'). The poetry was formal, with carefully counted syllables in each line. Popular themes were Christian legends, lives of saints and tales from classical antiquity. The poems were cited to villagers in public plazas. Two traits separate this form from the mester de juglaría: didacticism and erudition. Gonzalo de Berceo was one of the greatest advocates of this school, writing on religious subjects.

Spanish prose gained popularity in the mid-thirteenth century when King Alfonso X of Castile gave support and recognition to the writing form. He, with the help of his groups of intellectuals, directed the composition of many prose works including Las siete partidas, the first modern book of laws of the land written in the people's language. Another work was La primera crónica general which accounted for the history of Spain from the creation until the end of Alfonso's father's reign, San Fernando. For his direction of these works and many others he directed, Alfonso X is called the father of Spanish prose. His nephew, Don Juan Manuel is famous for his prose work El Conde Lucanor which is a frame story or short stories within an overall story. In this work, the Conde Lucanor seeks advice from his wise counselor, Patronio, who gives the advice through the telling of stories. Juan Manuel also wrote lesser-known works such as El libro de los estados on the social classes and El libro del caballero y escudero on philosophical discussions. Toward the end of the Middle Ages, writer Fernando del Pulgar (1436-1490?) created a new type of prose named the verbal portrait. This form is demonstrated by Pulgar's work Claros varones de Castilla in which he represents the detailed lives of twenty-four distinguished contemporaries. He explores their moral and psychological natures as well as physical traits. Pulgar was the official historian of the monarchs Fernando and Isabel, the famous Catholic Monarchs of Spain. This position gave him close encounters with the characters in this book, making the work realistic and detailed.

Lyric poetry in the Middle Ages can be divided into three groups: the jarchas, the popular poems originating from folk-songs sung by commoners, and the courtly poetry of the nobles. Alfonso X of Castile fits into the third group with his series of three hundred poems, written in Galician: Las cantigas de Santa María. Another poet, Juan Ruiz, or the Arcipreste de Hita is an outstanding lyricist of the fourteenth century. His only work, Libro de buen amor is a framework tale in which he includes translations from Ovid, satires, little poems called serranillas, twenty-nine fables, a sermon on Christian armor, and many lyric poems that praise the Virgin Mary. Poet Íñigo López de Mendoza, the Marqués de Santillana (1398–1458), begins to show the movement away from the traditions of the Middle Ages. He shows a knowledge of Latin authors and familiarity with the works of Dante and Petrarch. Mendoza was also the first to introduce the sonnet into Spanish literature. The last great poet of the Middle Ages is Jorge Manrique. He is famous for his work which laments the death of his father, Coplas a la muerte de su padre. In this piece, Manrique shows classical feelings by expressing himself in a universal manner (all things come to an end). He is still considered a poet of the Middle Ages in that he finds peace and finality in religion.

The destruction of Spain's fleet in Cuba by U.S. gunboats in 1898 provoked a general cultural crisis in Spain. The "Disaster" of 1898 led established writers to seek practical political, economic, and social solutions in essays grouped under the literary heading of "Regeneracionismo". For a group of younger writers, among them Miguel de Unamuno, Pío Baroja, and José Martínez Ruiz (Azorín), the Disaster and its cultural repercussions inspired a deeper, more radical literary shift that affected both form and content. These writers, along with Ramón del Valle-Inclán, Antonio Machado, Ramiro de Maeztu, and Ángel Ganivet, came to be known as the "Generation of 98". The label from its outset was controversial and even Azorín, the source of its origin, came to reject it. Nevertheless, it stuck as a way to describe a group of writers who turned in content from the more general exploration of universal middle class values characteristic of Nineteenth Century Realism to an obsession with questions of a more national nature. Their articles, essays, poems, and novels exploring Spanish history and geography carried existential overtones, expressing overall a sense of deep malaise at the social injustice, political bungling, and cultural indifference evident in contemporary Spanish society.

Within a matter of years, these young authors had transformed their nation’s literary landscape. To be sure, established nineteenth century realists, such as Benito Pérez Galdós, continued to write novels and theater into the second decade of the twentieth century, and, again in the case of Galdós, were much admired by the new generation of writers. Nevertheless, with the novels of Unamuno, Azorín, Pío Baroja, and Valle Inclán, the theater of the latter, and the poetry of Antonio Machado and Unamuno, a definitive literary shift had taken place—a shift in both form and content—pointing towards the more celebrated experimental writings of Spain's vanguard writers of the 1920s.

Thanks to Azorín's designation of his fellow writers as a “generation", contemporary critics and later literary historians were to catalogue and then interpret the arrival of new batches of authors in such generational terms for nearly the next one hundred years. Certainly, the terminology possesses a certain organizational elegance and indeed, recognizes the significant impact of major political and cultural events on changing literary expressions and tastes (for example, the 1898 connection, or a 1927 literary celebration that briefly united nearly every major vanguard poet in Spain).

The next supposed “generation" of Spanish writers following those of ´98 already calls into question the value of such terminology. By the year 1914—the year of the outbreak of the First World War and of the publication of the first major work of the generation's leading voice, José Ortega y Gasset—a number of slightly younger writers had established their own place within the Spanish cultural field. Leading voices include the poet Juan Ramón Jiménez, the academics and essayists Ramón Menéndez Pidal, Gregorio Marañon, Manuel Azaña, Eugeni d'Ors, and Ortega y Gasset, and the novelists Gabriel Miró, Ramón Pérez de Ayala, and Ramón Gómez de la Serna. While still driven by the national and existential questions that obsessed the writers of ´98, they approached these topics with a greater sense of distance and objectivity. These writers had enjoyed more formal academic training than their predecessors, many taught within the walls of academia, and one, Azaña, was to become President and face of the Second Republic. Their genre of choice were the essay and the article, their arguments more systematic, and their tastes, more European.

In contrast to Unamuno's existential obsessions or Machado's conceptual, earth-bound verse, Juan Ramón's poetry pursued a more esoteric version of beauty and truth above all, while still manifesting an internalized sense of the existential dilemmas that plagued intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth century. Juan Ramón was Spain's great modernist poet and the maestro of the coming vanguardist Generation of 1927. In 1957 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. José Ortega y Gasset became the spokesman for this and essential every generation of writers in the first half of the twentieth century. In essays like “Meditations on the Quijote," “The Rebellion of the Masses," and most famously, “The Dehumanization of Art," Ortega laid out theories of art and society that lucidly explained and celebrated twentieth century vanguard experimentation while holding fast to an elitist social vision whose eclipse this art ironically expressed. The most elusive voice of this generation, and arguably, unclassifiable within this group was the novelist Ramón Gómez de la Serna who carried the narrative experiments of Unamuno and Valle Inclán to absurd extremes, such as in his 1923 novel, El novelista, where varieties of plays with narrative subjectivity result in chapters envisioned through the eyes and voice of street lamps. More approachable and enduring are Gómez de la Serna's “Greguerías," an original form of aphorism that he described as “humor plus metaphor."

Around 1920 a younger group of writers—mostly poets—began publishing works that from their beginnings revealed the extent to which younger artists were absorbing the literary experimentation of the writers of 1898 and 1914. Poets Pedro Salinas, Jorge Guillén, Federico García Lorca, Vicente Aleixandre, Dámaso Alonso, Manuel Altolaguirre were likewise the most closely tied to formal academia yet. Novelists such as Benjamín Jarnés, Rosa Chacel, Francisco Ayala, and Ramón J. Sender were equally experimental and academic. Many of this generation were full-time university professors, while others spent periods as guest teachers and students. All were scholars of their national literary heritage, again evidence of the impact of the calls of “Regeneracionistas" and the Generation of 1898 for Spanish intelligence to turn at least partially inwards.

This group of poets continues to be, without contest, the most celebrated and studied of Spain's twentieth century writers. Their work provides a capstone to what some have called the “Silver Age" of Spanish Letters, a period that began with the veritable explosion of novel production following the bloodless coup of 1868 and that would come to a tragic end with the outbreak of civil war in July 1936.

The writing of this supposed generation can be roughly divided into three moments. In their early years their work arises still out of mostly local and national traditions, culminating in their united celebration of the tri-centennial of the death of Golden Age poet Luis de Góngora. From mid decade until the arrival of Spain's Second Republic in 1931, the Generation's poets reached the apex of their experimental writings, manifesting a clear awareness of the international vanguard “—isms" sweeping major Western capitals of the day. After 1931, the Generation's writing increasingly displays the imprint of the political and social stresses that would lead to Spain's bloody civil war.

The Spanish Civil War, lasting from July 1936 to April 1939, had a devastating impact on the trajectory of Spanish letters. In July 1936, Spain was at the height of its Silver Age. Every major writer of the three major generations—1898, 1914, and 1927—was still alive and productive. Those of 1914 and 1927 were at the height or just reaching the height of their literary powers. Several were recognized among Western civilization's most talented and influential writers. But by April 1939, Miguel de Unamuno, Antonio Machado, and Federico García Lorca, among others, were dead. All but a small handful of the remaining writers had fled into exile, dispersed across the length of the American continent, most never to enjoy the close associations of conferences, tertulias, and theater premiers that had so often united them in pre-war Madrid.

Among the handful of civil war poets and writers, Miguel Hernández stands out. A young disciple and associate of the Generation of 1898, Hernández, like Lorca, became a martyr to the Republican cause but this time as a post-war prisoner, fighting and writing as a soldier poet throughout the war and then languishing and dying in one of Franco's prisons in 1942. Among his important works, Perito en lunas (1933) from his pre-war surrealist days and Viento del pueblo (1937), evidence of the work of a soldier-poet, stand out.

The earliest years of the post-war were characterized more by hunger, repression, and suffering than by any significant literature. The published works of this period were true to pseudo-fascist dictator Francisco Franco's reactionary vision of a second Spanish golden age than to the material and existential anguish facing the majority of the country's population of the time. Neo-baroque poetry and paeans to Franco's Spain satisfied the censors but has enjoyed no subsequent critical shelf-life.

Ironically, the narrative production of one of Franco's censors would provide the first sign of literary revival in post-war Spain. In 1942, Camilo José Cela's novel, La familia de Pascual Duarte, used just enough experimental arrangement (temporally disjointed narrative development to problematize simple accusations of political cause-effect critique; prefaces and post-scripts that confuse authorial intentions) to avoid the censors´ cuts and to present to discerning Spanish readers an exposé of a spiritually troubled, socially impoverished, and structurally violent society. Cela was to remain for the next five decades as one of Spain's most important novelists, eventually receiving the Nobel Prize for literature in 1989.

With the 1945 publication of the Nadal Prize winning Nada by Carmen Laforet and the 1947 release of Miguel Delibes's La sombra del ciprés es alargada, readers of intelligent Spanish narrative at last had cause for hope. While the fresh, joyful experimentation of Spain's “Silver Age" writers had disappeared, Cela, Laforet, and Delibes at least showed a renewed commitment to a kind of writing that first, was connected to Spain's material reality, and second, would stretch itself aesthetically in its attempts to capture the experience.

By the middle of the next decade, a whole new generation of novelists was latching onto the early models laid down by Cela and Laforet. Equally influenced by the films of the Italian neorealists, novelists such as Luis Romero (La noria, 1951), Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio (El jarama, 1956), Jesús Fernández Santos (Los bravos, 1956), Carmen Martín Gaite (Entre visillos, 1957), Ignacio Aldecoa (El fulgor y la sangre, 1954), and Juan Goytisolo (Juegos de manos, 1954) produced a social realist tradition that was as celebrated as it was short lived.

Spanish poetry experienced renewal along similar lines. Dámaso Alonso's poem, “Insomnia" (1947) captures much of the angst and sense of violence that informed the works of Cela et al. and that would infuse the Spanish poetry of the era:

Madrid es una ciudad de más de un millón de cadáveres (según las últimas estadísticas).

¿Temes que se te sequen los grandes rosales del día, las tristes azucenas letales de tus noches?

Poems by José Hierro, Blas de Otero, and Gabriel Celaya were more direct, penning poems with such transparent titles as “Canto a España" (Hierro), “A la inmensa mayoría" (Otero), or “La poesía es un arma cargada de futuro" (Celaya).

However, by the mid-1950s, just as with the novel, a new generation which had only experienced the Spanish civil war in childhood was coming of age. While still informed by the material social and political conditions of Spanish society, the works of Ángel González, Claudio Rodríguez, José Ángel Valente, José Agustín Goytisolo, Francisco Brines, and Gloria Fuertes among others are less politically committed. Scholars differentiate these poets´ social focus as one of communication of experience versus Hierro's and Celaya's representation of experience. That is, while these younger poets were still interested in talking about Spain, they were at least equally focused on the interactive processes of communication with the reader who was contemporaneously living these experiences. Rather than passively ingest the poet's vision of contemporary society, the poets of what came to be called variously the generation of 1956 or “of the 1960s" produced poetry that engaged the reader in the interpretation if not the production of that vision.

By the early 1960s, the brief social realist burst in narrative was already growing stale. Numerous novelists took a brief hiatus from writing. The general consensus as a new decade began was that the straightforward “realism" of the previous decade, while manifesting the brutal “truth" of contemporary Spanish life under Franco, ultimately failed politically in that it directly modeled the very transparent discourse used so effectively by the authoritarian regime to crush the very opposition to which these writers aspired. Shaped in part by the French "nouveau roman" of writers like Alain Robbe-Grillet, the French "La Nouvelle Vague" cinema of Godard and Truffaut, and Latin American “Boom", Spanish novelists and poets, beginning perhaps with Luis Martín Santos's novel, Tiempo de silencio (1961), returned to the restless literary experimentation last seen in Spanish letters in the early 1930s. Among Spain's most celebrated “New Novels" of this period, Juan Benet's Volverás a Región (1967), Camilo José Cela's San Camilo, 36 (1969), Miguel Delibes's Cinco horas con Mario (1966), Juan Goytisolo's so called “Trilogy of Treason" consisting of Señas de identidad (1966), Reivindicación del conde Don Julián (1970), and Juan sin tierra (1975), Gonzalo Torrente Ballester's La saga/fuga de J.B. (1972), Juan Marsé's Si te dicen que caí (1973), and Luis Goytisolo's tetralogy Antagonía (1973–1981) stand out. While arguably pulling Spanish narrative by the collar from the relative dark of social realism towards the aesthetic standards of Europe's most elite avant-garde, many of these novels proved almost unreadable to much of the public, a reality nicely embodied at the end of Juan Goytisolo's trilogy when an already deconstructed Spanish prose gradually transforms into an unreadable Arabic.

The novel's experimentation was shadowed in Spanish poetry. José María Castellet's publication of Nueve novísimos poetas españoles recognized a group of artists whose works had similarly returned to early century experimentation. The works of Pere Gimferrer, Guillermo Carnero, and Leopoldo Panero, arguably the most important poets of the group, manifest a decidedly baroque style full of oblique cultural references, metapoetic devices, and other forms of extreme poetic self-consciousness spilling into the precious. Like the works of the New Novelists, this poetry was for a select group of readers, if not exclusive to the poets themselves.

When Franco at last died in November 1975, the important work of establishing democracy had an immediate impact on Spanish letters. Elitist narrative and poetry quickly gave way to narrative and poetry interested anew in not merely teaching (via content or style) but in delighting. Storytelling became the mantra for a new generation of Spanish novelists. Eduardo Mendoza's La verdad sobre el caso Savolta (1975) invited readers to escape to the roaring 1920s of Spain's pre-political, culturally vibrant Silver Age. While availing itself of various “New Novel" experiments such as narrative fragmentation, the use of mixed media, and the presence of numerous often contradictory narrative voices, Mendoza's novel could be read and enjoyed as an adventure story with romantic and dramatic appeal.

Carmen Martín Gaite's 1978 novel, El cuarto de atrás, was another manifestation of the happy melding of experiment with old-fashioned storytelling, pulling readers down through various narrative levels to explore dark memories of Spain's recent political past but with the light, ironic touch of a romance novel. Over the next several years a wealth of young new writers, among them Juan José Millás, Rosa Montero, Javier Marías, Luis Mateo Díez, José María Merino, Félix de Azúa, Cristina Fernández Cubas, Enrique Vila-Matas, Carme Riera, and later Antonio Muñoz Molina and Almudena Grandes, would begin carving out a prominent place for themselves within the Spanish cultural field. During the 1980s, Spanish narrative began appearing regularly on best seller lists for the first time since the pre-war era and many of this new generation became literary and cultural celebrities, living off their work as writers with all its blessing and curses, including the obligation to publish or perish.

By the 1990s, the pressure to produce for the large publishing houses was clearly diminishing the early literary promise of some of these writers. On the other hand, some like Javier Marías, after publishing since the early 1970s, finally achieved international fame, appearing on best-seller lists throughout Europe. Marías's novels Corazón tan blanco (1992) and Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí (1994), and his ever-expanding experiment with real fiction (begun with 1989's Todas las almas and continued through weekly newspaper columns, 1998's Negra espalda del tiempo, and extended in his 21st century trilogy, Tu rostro mañana), placed him on numerous critics´ Nobel Prize shortlists.

The big money available through novel publishing manifest itself in the 1990s in the explosion of literary prizes, awarded in Spain, unlike the UK's Man Booker or the U.S.´s Pulitzer, to unpublished works. Literary prizes became little more than publicity opportunities. The long-standing Planeta and Nadal prizes, already media events, grew in importance and remuneration. They were joined during the decade by the Primavera, Alfaguara, and Lara Prizes, the return of the Café Gijón and the Biblioteca Breve prizes. Most carried large sums for the winners and guaranteed—often obligated—long international book tours.

Into this economically charged mix stepped two new phenomena, the literary superstar and the literary celebrity. The former is almost entirely embodied by journalist turned novelist Arturo Pérez Reverte who has managed to merit a certain critical acclaim while topping the sales charts with nearly every novel he writes. Many of his novels have been converted into popular films. A lesser figure as far as novel sales, but still important to the overall industry is the literary celebrity. These celebrities range from politically powerful figures like Antonio Muñoz Molina and Jon Juaristi to brief media flashes like Ray Loriga, José Ángel Mañas, and Lucía Etxchebarría. The latter three were the most representative members of the last of the twentieth century's supposed literary “generations." The “Generación X," as critics dubbed them, brought black humor to a certain kind of post-political social realism focused principally on sex, drugs, rock-n-roll and the mental illness that accompanies it. These writers proved an excellent marketing phenomenon. That their works will endure is doubtful.

New novelists whose work is more likely to endure that began publishing in this period include Rafael Chirbes, Belén Gopegui, David Trueba, the Basques writers Bernardo Atxaga and Álvaro Bermejo, the Galician's Manuel Rivas and Suso de Toro among others. In the final decade of the 1990s, then, arguably five generations of writers—from Cela, to Sánchez Ferlosio, to Mendoza, to Muñoz Molina, to the Generation X authors—were sharing the expanding literary space of Spanish narrative. Notwithstanding the plethora of prize money that threatened to drown out quality with media-generated noise, the Spanish literary field at the end of the twentieth century was as promising as it had been since the 1920s.