the spanish homework help

the spanish homework help

Exploring Key Themes and Literary Devices in Spanish Literature

1. Introduction to Spanish Literature

Spanish literature, like most great literatures of the world, has been a meeting place for a richness of races, national characteristics, and a vast range of cultural inheritances. The great variety of the different stages, styles, forms, and literary movements in Spanish literature, along with the social forces that have imposed themselves upon the written word, represent the main theme of today’s Hispano-American culture. These novelties give Spanish literature a character which goes beyond the work itself and includes the social process of the writer and the making of that work. Spanish literature constitutes the most significant document and the best testimony of the Spanish spirit. Spain has been, through the centuries, represented in a large part of the world by its literature with its splendor, originality, and variety. The essence of her true character is actually found in her most precious possession: her matchless literature.

We find in Spain, perhaps more so than in any other European country, a harmonic combination of race, blood, and history. For it is due not only to men who have built her monuments, but also to her poets and writers. They are an expression of her most intimate feelings and of her most profound creative spirit. Using language that is brilliant, fervent, concrete, at times dreamy and idealistic, she often has written with passion and devotion, lines that live and that are carried within people who, possessed of a warm sense of poetic emotion, can extract from Spain’s soul the essence of her sensibility, the tremendous febrile heart that beats within all, and that goes far beyond a landscape or explicitly visual impressions. From the pen of her writers, like the brush strokes of her painters, we find forever expressed the depth of the Spanish soul and spirit.

2. Major Themes in Spanish Literature

While it may not be as famous as the literature of England or France, Spanish literature has a rich and varied tradition that stretches back many centuries. One of the major themes in Spanish literature is that of honor, which was of great importance in the medieval noble society when Castilian poetry was born of the contact between a Christian warrior caste of Spanish and Arab origin with Muslims and Jews, despite conflicts and wars. Thus, the prohibited sexual love and the resulting social scandal is another constant in the poetry of the time. On the other hand, popular literature composed of romances and songs, collected mainly in the ‘Canticle of My Cid’, ‘Libro de Alexandre’ and ‘Mocedades de Rodrigo’, referred to other characters and situations, a people with wishes and aspirations that often were not reflected in the official work of the court.

Christian influences also brought with it the desire to instruct which crystallized in the common Spanish books of the 13th, and in polychord formulas of medieval theater. All three roots were exposed in the literary Ballad poetry, also medieval, which glorified the way of life with determination and joy. In Golden Age literature, the recurring myth of the cursed sculptor refers mostly to moral and spiritual interpretations, as the hero is defeated by his own envy of his own body ability and by his greed to possess the ‘prohibited fruit’ through his craft. Ultimately, this myth conveys humility and fear of punishment of human pride.

3. Prominent Literary Devices in Spanish Literature

As a literary concept, society is a collective notion. It involves numerous individuals bound together by certain objectives. Literary texts can become specific methods of research and critical analysis to describe, define, and investigate the group, suggesting its composition, hierarchies, and different levels of development. The relationships between characters in a text are not fixed, but are constructed and analyzed by subsequent groups of readers. In this respect, readers who are trying to explore the text must attempt to identify different concepts or social marks that are revealed in complex constellations between the characters.

The environment is generally shaped by the characters themselves. They bring life into the places they frequent; even if they say very little, they nevertheless demonstrate that life exists there. Actors like and dislike the places where they carry out their roles. For characters, the environment outside of themselves represents a meeting point, the place they always leave but to which they must return afterward. In brief, the environment is separate from characters, without being a colleague. There are several literary representations in which this separation is absolute: in many texts produced in certain periods of literature, the environment is pure and simple ivory-tower decoration; characters come and go in a place, but the importance of their movements is always frustrated.

4. Analysis of Select Works

In “Mire Reforma” (“Look, a Reform”), Quevedo describes romantically Lucrecia Borgia, the Italian noblewoman who is also considered one of the most powerful papal families. She is depicted here as a volunteer attending services and helping the sick and poor. But Lucrecia was a scandalous figure, suspected of involvement in the murder of her husband, brother, and father, and poisoned. Who was Lucrecia Borgia in reality? Was she a saint or a sinner? Was she a victim or a malefactor? The short story of Quevedo is a story about Lucrecia’s reform, not a description of an actual event. The text implicitly draws attention to the fact that people sometimes exaggerate, perhaps deliberately, certain stories, as the Corinthians may have done with Porcio Paulo, and it encourages the project of a radical reform of public and private morals.

In “El arte de hacer comedia”, Quevedo criticized the representations typical of the dramaturgy of his time for leading to sin and crime and proposed a reform. But social criticism is not enough to define “El arte de hacer comedia”. The key to the interpretation of the essay, and to understand the project of the new Quevedo, may be that at a particular time in his life and in a particular situation, he felt the urgent need to change the world, seen by himself as a world in chaos (a vision of the dramatic global crisis for which the term baroque may be more appropriate than the term “New disorder”) that is not difficult to use in Freeman’s literature, laughter, and the oasis that is human life in a problematic world. “El Arte de Hacer Comedia” also slides in a unique new direction, the principle of which is different from all the above. The subjects and themes on which the “comedia” is not viable are previously proposed, and how these subjects and themes remain are presented. Quevedo seems here considerably away from the old stereotypes. Without embracing the concept of Aristotelian comedy, Quiroga subscribes to an idea far from strict comic disciplines. Quevedo’s ideas in this essay, and his humor, combined to constitute a reform option in Comedy and an unusual contribution to the debate on the genre and its modulations.

5. Conclusion and Future Directions

Spanish literature is rich in themes and literary devices, and this chapter presents a few distinct genres and a few distinguishing literary elements. It begins with a nice collection of themes in Spanish literature. The following is a brief summary of the different categories of themes: love, women, and freedom; space and time; mysticism and ethics; heroism; the marginalized; absurdities of life; and relationships. The next section in the chapter provides a variety of literary devices from Spanish literature: apostrophe; caricature, burlesque, and parody; parody and satire; irony, hyperbole, and litotes; metonymy; metaphor; and synesthesia. The last part of the chapter provides a short summary describing what are the most important literary works and what are the sources of each concept.