Spanish Literature - Enlightenment

In the Enlightenment of the 18th century, with the arrival of "the lights" to Spain, important topics are the prose of Fray Benito Jerónimo Feijoo, Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, and José Cadalso; the lyric of the Salmantine school (with Juan Meléndez Valdés), the lyric of the Madrilenian group (with the story-tellers Tomás de Iriarte and Félix María Samaniego), and the lyric of the Sevillian school; and also the theater, with Leandro Fernández de Moratín, Ramón de la Cruz and Vicente García de la Huerta. Enlightenment thinkers sought to apply systematic thinking to all forms of human activity, carrying it to the ethical and governmental spheres in exploration of the individual, society and the state.

Three phases in the Spanish literature of the 18th century are distinguished:

• Anti-Baroquism (until approximately 1750): It fights against the style of the preceding Baroque, which is considered excessively rhetorical and twisted. The recreational literature is not cultivated, but they are more interested in the essay and satire, utilizing the language with simplicity and purity.
• Neoclassicism (until the end of the 18th century): It is strongly influenced by French and Italian classicism. The writers also imitate the old classics (Greek and Roman); its boom extended since the reign of Fernando VI until the end of the century.
• Pre-Romanticism (end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century): The influence of the English philosopher John Locke, together with that of the French Étienne Bonnot of Condillac, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Denis Diderot, will cause a new feeling, dissatisfaction with the tyranny of reason, that emphasizes the right of the individuals to express their personal emotions (repressed then by the neoclassicals), among which figures fundamentally love. This current announces the decline of Neoclassicism and opens the door to Romanticism.