Spanish narrative prior to 1936

The 20th century began in Spain with a broad movement of cultural and artistic renewal that had two significant moments: the Generation of 1898 (Miguel de Unamuno, Azorín, Ramón María del Valle-Inclán, Pío Baroja) and the so-called Generation from 1914.

This renewal does not particularly reach the novelistic story, which prompts to try new formulas. Thus, it fosters not only the development of a psychological novel, but also a lyrical novel in which the expression of subjectivity predominates. Related to this attitude, it is necessary to consider the little interest that the writers of this period show towards the traditional account of events according to a chronological order; and this despite the enormous success of another group of narrators who stick to the classic modes of the story to put them at the service of entertainment or mere fun, or at the reformist and social impulse (Blasco Ibáñez, Felipe Trigo, v.gr.).
The break with the traditional story is achieved through a wide variety of more or less innovative structural and stylistic procedures:

1. multiplication of views,
2. intellectual digresions,
3. linguistic pricing that comes to reveal to the narrator in detriment of the narrated world, symbolism.

This renewing line will be continued by the writers of 14, most especially Ramón Pérez de Ayala, Gabriel Miró and Ramón Gómez de la Serna- without giving up yet in their desire to find a point of balance between realism and isolating experimentalism. The result is the creation of a novel corpus that combines access to a potentially wide audience with a demand for aesthetic value. And this without fully diluting the marked reformist and social concern that colors the activity of a large part of the authors and intellectuals of the moment.

The cultural climate in which the young novelist of 27 emerged is characterized, therefore, by an anti-realist attitude and by a determined desire for experimentation. This new narrative was brought together in the Nova Novorum series of Revista de Occidente. There a type of story is forged that tests the incorporation into the narrative

1. of the metaphorical style of poetry,
2. of fragmentation in boga in plastic arts and
3. of the dynamic vision learned in the cinema.

It is, therefore, a novel in which the narration is freed from dependence on the story, which breaks with the linear arrangement of time, and that opens a wide space for ironic or humorous distancing.

The entire narrative of 1927 can be divided into two main streams: the lyrical-intellectual novel (Benjamín Jarnés, Antonio Espina, Mauricio Bacarisse, Francisco Ayala, Pedro Salinas) and the humorous (Jardiel Poncela, Edgar Neville).

However, critics have ignored, if not despised, the importance of this relevant group of writers who are perfectly in tune with the modern European trends of the time.

Despite the repercussion of the Avant-garde, between the late 1920s and 1935 a generation of narrators emerged who, opposed to dehumanized art, cultivated a realistic novel with a social purpose. This new generation proposes a manifest rehabilitation of the human, of the testimonial value and of the moral and political transcendence of literature. A key figure in this evolution of the novel is José Díaz Fernández. Along with him, Joaquín Arderíus, Ramón J. Sender, Luisa Carnés Caballero, Andrés Carranque de Ríos and César Arconada, among others, are considered precursors of committed narrative.

See also:

Contemporary Spanish literature