Prose
The narrative is almost nonexistent in Spain during this period. Practically it is reduced to the Life of Diego de Torres Villarroel, or to the story Fray Gerundio de Campazas of Padre Isla.
Another modality of great influence in this time was the newspaper. Literary, scientific, or of curiosities, publications like the Newspaper of the Literate of Spain, The Censor or The Mail of Madrid contributed to spread the theories and the ideas of the moment in Spain, laying the principles of the Enlightenment.
On the contrary, the essay is the dominant genre. This educative and doctrinal prose shows a desire to approach the problems of the moment, tends to the reform of the customary and usually makes use of the epistolar form.
Read more about this topic: Spanish Enlightenment Literature
Famous quotes containing the word prose:
“Good Heavens! For more than forty years I have been speaking prose without knowing it.”
—Molière [Jean Baptiste Poquelin] (1622–1673)
“Despots play their part in the works of thinkers. Fettered words are terrible words. The writer doubles and trebles the power of his writing when a ruler imposes silence on the people. Something emerges from that enforced silence, a mysterious fullness which filters through and becomes steely in the thought. Repression in history leads to conciseness in the historian, and the rocklike hardness of much celebrated prose is due to the tempering of the tyrant.”
—Victor Hugo (1802–1885)
“Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement ... says heaven and earth in one word ... speaks of himself and his predicament as though for the first time. It has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.”
—Christopher Fry (b. 1907)