Spanish Literature After the Civil War

• The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) brought political change and repression, leading intellectuals and writers to exile.
• Spain was isolated from Europe and behind on cultural trends after the war.
• The 1960s brought more social openness, new themes, and ideas.
• The four key periods of literary focus are: the 1940s (post-war), the 1950s (social realism), the 1960s (formal renewal), and post-1975 literature.

Post-War Literature (1940s)

• Literature served the National side, under censorship, which led to intellectual decline and traditionalism, especially realism.

Social Realism (1950s)

• Authors reflected society's lack of freedoms, social inequality, and poverty through testimony and denouncement.

Formal Renovation (1960s)

• Social literature was used to change socio-political conditions, maintaining a critical perspective and realism, which led to experimental literature.

Literature Post-1975

• The end of the dictatorship brought publishing growth, eliminated censorship, and introduced foreign aesthetic trends.
• Literature became a product competing with cinema, TV, radio, and video games.
• Spanish writers aimed to recover from the period of Franco's rule until 2000.
• After 2001, novelists entered a global market facing more competition due to translations while trends spread quickly across countries.

Poetry

• Poetry experienced varied moments influenced by social context and decreasing public interest
• Systematic division by period is employed for analysis.

Poetry of the 1940s

• Poetry sought formal evasion and perfection.
• "Generation of '36" poets: Luis Felipe Vivanco, Leopoldo Panero, Luis Rosales, and Dionisio Ridruejo used classic meters (sonnets) for intimate themes like family, religion, and landscape, categorized as "rooted poetry."
• Dámaso Alonso (Generation of '27) broke from classical verse formalism in 1944.
• He used colloquial, direct, prosaic language, considering it "uprooted poetry," which opposed rooted poetry, as seen in Hijos de la ira.
• Vicente Aleixandre's poems proposed a pantheistic worldview with neoromantic tones, written with poetic passion and emotion, far from conventionality, significantly enriching Spanish poetry, as seen in Sombra del paraíso.
• Existentialist poetry emerged with authors like Blas de Otero, depicting man trapped in a hostile, incomprehensible world, gripped by loneliness, emptiness, uncertainty, fear, pain, the anguish of living and dying, and seeking serene or tormented refuge in God.

Poetry of the 1950s

• Social poetry emerged, with authors viewing poetry as a reflection of reality, adopting realistic, testimonial, supportive, and critical attitudes.
• Poets aimed to reach "the immense majority" through clear content, simple language, and free verse with careful formal elaboration.
• Major authors include: José Hierro (1922-2022), Gabriel Celaya (1911-1991), and Blas de Otero (1916-1979).
• José Hierro focused on human-centered poetry.
• Gabriel Celaya, a surrealist/existentialist, considered poetry a tool for world transformation.
• Blas de Otero, whose poetry went through existentialist, loving, and social phases, used both sonnets and free verse.

Poetry of the 1960s

• The poetry of knowledge emerged, surpassing social poetry by maintaining human and supportive aspects while focusing on aesthetic values and language possibilities.
• Important authors include: Ángel González, José Agustín Goytisolo, Jaime Gil de Biedma, José Ángel Valente, and Claudio Rodríguez.
• These poets avoided prosaism/spontaneity, seeking a more stylistic language, avoided symbolism/avant-garde, and adopted a quasi-narrative/conversational tone with a sober, efficient, and precise lexicon, critical but intimate, seeing poetry as a vehicle for knowledge rather than communication

The "Novísimos"

• An anthology titled "Nine Very New Spanish Poets" appeared in 1970.
• The anthology established a new poetry that was skeptical about its ability to change the world, experimental, aesthetic, and playful.
• The movement attacked social poetry, proclaiming art's autonomy, foreign cultural motifs, disregarding traditional metric forms, and incorporated exotic elements like Marilyn Monroe, Che Guevara, and The Beatles.
• The style was rooted in surrealism, incorporating collage and cinematographic flash techniques.
• Intertextuality was a key deciphered by well-read readers, making texts hermetic due to careful rhetoric.
• Key figures in the movement are Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Antonio Martínez Sarrión, Pere Gimferrer, Guillermo Carnero, Leopoldo Panero, Ana Mª Moix, Félix de Azúa, Vicente Molina Foix, and Antonio Colinas.

Poetry from 1975 to the Present

• Post-dictatorship poetry found origins in the Generation of '27, rejecting the cold, conceptual approach of the previous generation and seeking emotion.
• Thematic maintained the use of urban life, the everyday becoming autobiographical poems.
• Stylistic and cultural ornamentation from the "Novísimos" was rejected in favor of a more balanced rhetoric.
• The language, colloquial in tone, laden with modern life lexicon, and irony distances the poetry from reality.
• While classical metric forms saw a return, free verse was not abandoned.
• This era saw heightened social and economic activity and new trends.
• Key authors include: Blanca Andreu, Antonio Colinas, Jaime Siles, Julio Llamazares, and Ana Rosetti.
• A significant trend includes experimental poetry which reestablished textual grounding in concrete spaces and times.
• Experimental poetry sought a broader audience, distancing itself from the elitism of the "Novísimos" and encompassed the everyday, urban or deep intimacy, and reflection on time.
• It featured emotive content, anecdotes leading to narrative, and favors a conversational style and dramatic monologue via the poet and their experience.
• Key figures include: Luis García Montero, Jon Juaristi, and Miguel d'Ors.
• Composers also contributed, writing lyrics with formal complexity and musicality, like Joan Manuel Serrat, Joaquín Sabina, Luis Eduardo Aute, Enrique Bunbury, and hip-hop artists such as Kase.O.

Theater

Theater of the Immediate Post-War Period

• Plays faced strict censorship until 1975, leading to cautious criticism and a focus on comic theater
• Characters' entanglements, interior set designs, and recurring themes were employed.
• Theatrical productions incorporated cinematographic techniques, such as changes in location and time, following the nineteenth-century comedy model
• Many authors from the national side during the civil war (Max Aub, Alejandro Casona, and Rafael Alberti) were exiled.
• Margarita Xirgu sustained theatrical innovation from South America.
• Rafael Alberti, in exile in France, Chile, and Uruguay, wrote; Noche de Guerra en el Museo del Prado, El trébol florido, El adefesio, and La Gallarda.
• Pedro Salinas created inventive theater, characterized by literary elegance, linguistic clarity, and harmonious traditions, as illustrated by Judit y el tirano and El Director.
• Fernando Arrabal, who offered personal vision, sought social rejection and to live on the fringes, ranging from critical marginalization to combative offense, and had surrealist roots which explain coherence throughout his works.
• Enrique Jardiel Poncela and Miguel Mihura introduced absurd theater, initially unappreciated.

Realistic Theater

• Historia de una escalera, by Buero Vallejo, premiered in 1950, and Escuadra hacia la muerte, by Alfonso Sastre, in 1955, which began a theatrical style aimed at a new, young, and university audience.
• Alfonso Sastre began the social theater trend, placing social elements above artistic ones and interpreting and transforming reality.
• He wanted combative, denouncing, and radical theater conceptualizing revolution as a bloody sacrifice in, La mordaza, Muerte en el barrio, Guillermo Tell tiene los ojos tristes, ο Asalto nocturno.
• Buero Vallejo shifted through various phases, publishing the La fundación and El concierto de San Ovidio, both with cinematographic touches.
• Lauro Olmo, José Martín Recuerda, and Carlos Muñiz explored social injustice, exploitation, inhumane conditions, and alienation utilizing violent and uncompromising language with social victim protagonists.

The New Spanish Theater

• The "independent theater" began in Catalonia in the late 1960s, opposing commercial theater with large productions.
• One group was Els Joglars, of Albert Boadella
• Plays opposed commercial theater, valued self-criticism and the text was secondary.
• José Ruibal wrote difficult works designed "to write against the public."

Experimental Theater

• There has been a new trend in experimental theater, which favors spectacle with sound/light effects over text, and includes genres like revues or cabarets.
• Experimental theater breaks the barrier between spectator and work.
• Performance groups like Tricicle or Yllana specialize in gestural humor and the use of gestures and sounds.

Current Theater

• New authors have emerged since democracy returned with diverse trends.
• These playwrights include: Domingo Mirás, José Sanchís Sinisterra , Fermín Cabal, and José Luis Alonso de Santos.

The Novel

• The Spanish Civil War caused death, exile, and censorship, causing earlier literary trends to lose relevance.
• From 1939 forward, the novel needed reinvention.
• Literary production can be divided into: post-war, social realism, technical renovation, post-1975, and 21st-century phases.

Post-War Novel

• Novelists writing immediately after the war sought new paths focusing on triumphalist, critical, and existential novels.
• Triumphalist novels aligned with the regime, defended new values while blaming the Republican side for the situation.
• The start of critical novels began with Camilo José Cela’s La familia de Pascual Duarte.
• It portrayed the harsh reality of the human condition with violent and miserable characters.
• The existential novel is represented by Nada, by Carme Laforet, La sombra del ciprés es alargada, by Miguel Delibes, and Javier Mariño, by Gonzalo Torrente Ballester.
• The novels reflect existential anguish, sadness, and life's frustration with socially marginalized, distressed, and rootless characters, poverty, ignorance, violence, and political persecution, however there isn’t any clear criticism to avoid censorship.

Social Realism (1950-1962)

• Easing censorship allowed the rise of works denouncing poverty and injustice in the 1950s, influenced by Jean Paul Sartre's European movement.
• Miguel Delibes and Camilo José Cela set the stage for social realism with El camino (1950) and La colmena (1951).
• Themes included rural life, urban work, city life, working classes, the civil war, and humble people

Renovation of Narrative Techniques (1962-1975)

• Social realism waned in the early '60s due to simplification, political focus, reader fatigue, and a changing country.
• Luis Martín Santos's 1962 Tiempo de Silencio innovatively demonstrated how to write a critical novel.
• Young Spanish writers adopted Latin American novel models and learned to balance critical and artistic quality while treating reality outside purely realistic means or in so-called, "magical realism."
• Authors received influence from Kafka, Proust, Joyce, Thomas Mann, and the "lost generation," and began including multiple technical resources that sought to move away from traditional forms.
• Plots were secondary with focus on the character analysis.
• Anti-heroes are analyzed for internal conflict and contradictions.
• Sequences were taken from visual media, such as film and TV.
• Narrative time lost linearity.
• Superimposed events in separate locations.
• Narratives appeared in the second person.
• Internal monologues and dialogues.
• Ideological comments appeared throughout, in dialogue and monologues.
• Stylistically, prose and verse blurred.
• News and advertisements were used.
• Typography was modified and punctuation removed.

The Novel from the Transition to 2000

• Experimentalism lost popularity during this period, and other styles gained prominence.
• La saga/fuga de J.B. (1972), by Gonzalo Torrente Ballester, parodied experimental literature.
• Intrigue and plot returned to importance, as in Eduardo Mendoza's La verdad sobre el caso Savolta (1975).
• Spanish authors aimed to access a larger market and adapt to global trends, and while the number of readers decreased due to competition from TV and film.
• Metanovels: dealt with the process of writing a novel.
• Lyrical novel: looked for formal perfection.
• Autobiographical novel: included historical elements as the novel, El río de la luna, or daily themes as in, Corazón tan blanco.
• Detective novel: a series of novels by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán.
• Urban Novels: dealt with the problems of young adults.

Novel of the 21st Century

• The novel has become a product within cultural products, where books that thrive are expanded to sequels, series, and film.
• Social media use in writing that aims for profitability.
• Carlos Ruiz Zafón's La sombra del viento (2001) combined metaliterature, magical realism, and intrigue.
• Zafón's complete series sold globally, set a new trend blending mystery, personal conflicts, and religious themes like Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code
• Followed by Matilde Asensi, Julia Navarro, Javier Sierra, and Ildefonso Falcones.
• Arturo Pérez Reverte wrote the Captain Alatriste saga.
• Dolores Redondo wrote police novel: or El tiempo entre costuras, which contained romance.
• Santiago Posteguillo's trilogy takes place in ancient Rome in Escipión el africano.
• Blue Jeans and Elísabet Benavente wrote youth romance with the incorporation of cell phones and social media integrated for content.
• Laura Gallego began series of epic fantasy such as, El valle de los lobos and Memorias de Idhún.
• Roberto Santiago created children's series such as, Los futbolísimos and Los forasteros del tiempo.