Book contents
- Frontmatter
- I INTRODUCTION
- II HISTORY AND CANONICITY
- III THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD
- IV EARLY MODERN SPAIN: RENAISSANCE AND BAROQUE
- V THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND NEOCLASSICISM
- VI THE FORGING OF A NATION: THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
- 22 Romanticism in Spain
- 23 The theatre in Romantic Spain
- 24 Mariano José de Larra
- 25 Romantic poetry
- 26 Romantic prose, journalism, and costumbrismo
- 27 Benito Pérez Galdós
- 28 The Realist novel
- 29 The Naturalist novel
- 30 The theatre in Spain 1850–1900
- 31 Poetry in the second half of the nineteenth century
- VII THE MODERN, MODERNISMO, AND THE TURN OF THE CENTURY
- VIII TWENTIETH-CENTURY SPAIN AND THE CIVIL WAR
- IX IN AND OUT OF FRANCO SPAIN
- X POST-FRANCO SPANISH LITERATURE AND FILM
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
22 - Romanticism in Spain
from VI - THE FORGING OF A NATION: THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
- Frontmatter
- I INTRODUCTION
- II HISTORY AND CANONICITY
- III THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD
- IV EARLY MODERN SPAIN: RENAISSANCE AND BAROQUE
- V THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND NEOCLASSICISM
- VI THE FORGING OF A NATION: THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
- 22 Romanticism in Spain
- 23 The theatre in Romantic Spain
- 24 Mariano José de Larra
- 25 Romantic poetry
- 26 Romantic prose, journalism, and costumbrismo
- 27 Benito Pérez Galdós
- 28 The Realist novel
- 29 The Naturalist novel
- 30 The theatre in Spain 1850–1900
- 31 Poetry in the second half of the nineteenth century
- VII THE MODERN, MODERNISMO, AND THE TURN OF THE CENTURY
- VIII TWENTIETH-CENTURY SPAIN AND THE CIVIL WAR
- IX IN AND OUT OF FRANCO SPAIN
- X POST-FRANCO SPANISH LITERATURE AND FILM
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
Summary
Definition of “Romantic” appeared less complicated in the early nineteenth century than subsequent critical disputation might suggest. Within the parameters adumbrated by the German critic and poet Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) – for René Wellek “the fountainhead of universal literary history” – application of the term as systematized by the brothers August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel and by Madame de Staël came to be understood and acknowledged all over Europe. It was in 1814 under the heading “Reflexiones de Schlegel sobre el teatro, traducidas del alemán” (“Schlegel’s Reflections upon the Theatre, Translated from the German”) that Johann Nikolaus Böhl von Faber (1770–1836), an expatriate German merchant and bibliophile resident in the southwest port city of Cadiz, first sought to acclimatize within Spain those new aesthetic doctrines originating in his native land. Using principally the twelfth and fourteenth lectures of A. W. Schlegel’s Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur (“Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature”) of 1809–1811, Böhl exhorted a return to national traditions, to a literature reflecting popular ideals that was heroic, monarchical, and Christian, the expression of a discernibly Spanish worldview embodied in Golden Age drama; he signed himself an “apasionado de la naciön española” (“passionate admirer of the Spanish nation”).
There was a significant ideological dimension. Böhl, a Catholic convert with servil – i.e. conservative and Absolutist – connections, was combating what he saw as the deleterious consequences of Enlightenment rationalism; he resented the imposition upon Spain of a foreign Neoclassical preference, dismissing detractors of Calderón and of Spain’s literary heritage as unpatriotic subversives.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge History of Spanish Literature , pp. 343 - 349Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005