Early 19th-century Spanish literature suffered as a result of the Napoleonic Wars and their economic repercussions. Spain experienced soaring inflation, and labor across the peninsula was at low ebb as a result of emigration and military service. Spain’s agriculture was devastated, its cottage industries dwindled and nearly disappeared, and industrialization lagged behind that of other western European countries. These problems were further aggravated by the loss of its American colonies. King Ferdinand VII’s anachronistic attempts to restore absolutist monarchy drove many liberals into exile in England and France, both countries then under the sway of Romanticism.

Traditional scholarship has viewed Spanish Romanticism as imported by liberals returning after Ferdinand’s death in 1833, the year frequently deemed the beginning of Spanish Romanticism. Some, however, recognize cultivators of Gothic fiction such as José de Cadalso y Vázquez as 18th-century Spanish antecedents. Debates that prepared the way for Romanticism flourished from 1814 onward: in Cádiz in discussions of literary values initiated by Johann Niklaus Böhl von Faber; in Barcelona with the founding of the literary periodical El europeo (“The European”) in 1823; and in Madrid with Agustín Durán’s essay (1828) on Siglo de Oro (Golden Age) drama and his Colección de romances antiguos (1828–32; “Collection of Ancient Ballads”).

Romanticism in Spain was, in many respects, a return to its earlier classics, a continuation of the rediscovery initiated by 18th-century scholars. Important formal traits of Spanish Romantic drama—mingling genres, rejecting the unities, diversifying metrics—had characterized Siglo de Oro dramatist Lope de Vega and his contemporaries, whose themes reappeared in Romantic garb. Some have therefore argued that the native flowering of Spanish Romanticism was not a tardy import; its principles were instead already present in Spain, but their full expression was delayed by the reactionary, tyrannical monarchy’s persecution of members of a movement that was, at its beginning, liberal and democratic. Production of Romantic dramas was also postponed until after Ferdinand VII’s death.

Spanish Romanticism, typically understood as having two branches, had no single leader. José de Espronceda y Delgado and his works epitomize the Byronic, revolutionary, metaphysical vein of Spanish Romanticism, and his Estudiante de Salamanca (in two parts, 1836 and 1837; “Student of Salamanca”), Canciones (1840; “Songs”), and El diablo mundo (unfinished, published 1840; “The Devilish World”) were among the period’s most celebrated subjective lyrics. The enormously successful drama Don Álvaro o la fuerza del sino (1835; “Don Alvaro; or, The Force of Destiny”) by Ángel de Saavedra, duque de Rivas, and the preface, by the critic Antonio Alcalá Galiano, to Saavedra’s narrative poem El moro expósito (1834; “The Foundling Moor”) embody the Christian and monarchical aesthetics and ideology of the second, more traditional branch of Spanish Romanticism. That branch’s quintessential representative is José Zorrilla y Moral, author of the period’s most enduring drama, Don Juan Tenorio (1844). Prolific, facile, and declamatory, Zorrilla produced huge numbers of plays, lyric and narrative verse collections, and enormously popular rewrites of Siglo de Oro plays and legends; he was treated as a national hero.

One major Romantic theme concerned liberty and individual freedom. The late Romantic poet Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, in Rimas (published posthumously in 1871; “Rhymes”), expressed his own tortured emotions, suffering, and solitude but also celebrated love, poetry, and intimacy while experimenting with free verse. Rimas influenced more 20th-century Spanish poets than any other 19th-century work.

A number of notable women writers emerged under Romanticism. Carolina Coronado’s early fame rested on a collection of poetry, Poesías, first published in 1843. Her poems sounded many feminist notes, although she in later life became conservative. In 1850 she published two short novels, Adoración and Paquita. La Sigea (1854), the first of three historical novels, re-created the experience of the Renaissance humanist Luisa Sigea de Velasco; Jarilla and La rueda de desgracia (“The Wheel of Misfortune”) appeared in 1873. Poet, dramatist, and prose writer Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda was born in Cuba but spent most of her adult life in Spain. She was the author of a pioneering abolitionist novel, Sab (1841), as well as novels on Mexico’s Aztec past and a protofeminist novel, Dos mujeres (1842; “Two Women”). Gómez is considered one of the foremost Romantic writers of the 19th century and one of the greatest women poets. Rosalía de Castro is known primarily for her poetry and novels in Galician, but her last collection of poems, En las orillas del Sar (1884; Beside the River Sar), written in Castilian, brought her a wider audience.

While poetry and theater claimed the major honors, Spanish Romanticism also produced many novels—but none that rivaled those of Scottish contemporary Sir Walter Scott. The best, El Señor de Bembibre (1844) by Enrique Gil y Carrasco, reflects Gil’s carefully researched history of the Templars in Spain. Other important novels are Mariano José de Larra’s El doncel de Don Enrique el doliente (1834; “The Page of King Enrique the Invalid”) and Espronceda’s Sancho Saldaña (1834).

American Romantic literature

After the American Revolution (1775–83), and increasingly after the War of 1812, American writers were exhorted to produce a literature that was truly native. Several movements of American literature developed through this impulse that also fall under the wide umbrella of Romanticism.

• American Gothic: a literary period from the late 1790s to roughly the 1860s in which Gothic themes were expressed in fiction
• American Renaissance: a period from the 1830s roughly until the end of the Civil War (1861–65) in which American literature came of age as an expression of a national spirit
• Transcendentalism: a philosophical movement centered in Concord, Massachusetts, that essentially combined Romanticism with reform, celebrating the individual rather than the masses, emotion rather than reason, and nature rather than humanity

The work of Edgar Allan Poe exemplifies the literary American Gothic even as it anticipated genres such as science fiction and the detective story. Reared in the South, Poe lived and worked as an author and editor in northeastern cities such as Philadelphia and New York City. His work was shaped largely by analytical skill that showed clearly in his role as an editor: time after time he gauged the taste of readers so accurately that circulation figures of magazines under his direction soared impressively. It showed itself in his critical essays, wherein he lucidly explained and logically applied his criteria. His Gothic tales of terror were written in accordance with his findings when he studied the most popular magazines of the day. His masterpieces of terror—“The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842), “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846), and others—were written according to a carefully worked out psychological method. So were his detective stories, such as “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), which historians credited as the first of the genre. As a poet, he achieved fame with “The Raven” (1845). His work later had a strong influence on European literature.

Other American writers whose work contained Gothic elements are Charles Brockden Brown (sometimes called “the father of the American novel”), Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Irving, the youngest member of a prosperous merchant family from New York, joined with ebullient young men of the town in producing the Salmagundi papers (1807–08), which satirized the foibles of Manhattan’s citizenry. This was followed by A History of New York (1809), by “Diedrich Knickerbocker,” a burlesque history that mocked pedantic scholarship and sniped at the old Dutch families. Irving’s models in these works were Neoclassical English satirists, from whom he had learned to write in a polished, bright style. Later, however, having met Sir Walter Scott and having become acquainted with imaginative German literature, he introduced a new Romantic note in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent (1819–20), Bracebridge Hall (1822), and other works. The Sketch Book contains his best-known tales, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle,” both Americanized versions of German folktales that have been called the first American short stories.

Irving was the first American writer to win the respect of British critics. Cooper, however, won even wider fame. Following the pattern of Scott’s “Waverley” novels, he did his best work in the Leatherstocking tales (1823–41), a five-volume series celebrating the career of a great frontiersman named Natty Bumppo, alias Leatherstocking. Identified from the start with the vanishing wilderness and its native people, Leatherstocking was an unalterably elegiac figure, wifeless and childless, hauntingly loyal to a lost cause. With novels such as The Last of the Mohicans (1826), Cooper’s skill in weaving history into inventive plots and in characterizing his compatriots brought him acclaim not only in America and England but on the continent of Europe as well. As the Leatherstocking series continued, Cooper retreated stylistically from a realistic picture of the frontier in order to portray a more idyllic and romantic wilderness; by doing so he could exploit the parallels between the Native Americans and the forlorn Celtic heroes of Scottish poet James Macpherson’s pseudo-epic Ossian (in such dubious works as Fingal [1762] and Temora [1763]). Cooper’s Leatherstocking tales were another manifestation of the widespread popularity of the “noble savage” concept during Romanticism.

History also figured in tales and romances of Hawthorne, the leading New England fictionist of the period. Many tales and longer works—for example, his masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter (1850)—were set against a background of colonial America with emphasis upon its distance in time from 19th-century New England. Others, such as The House of the Seven Gables (1851), dealt with the past as well as the present. Still others, such as The Marble Faun (1860), were set in distant countries. Remote though they were at times from what Hawthorne called “the light of common day,” they showed deep psychological insight and probed into complex ethical problems.

The authors who began to come to prominence in the 1830s and were active until about the end of the Civil War—the humorists, the classic New Englanders, Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and others—did their work in a new spirit, and their achievements were of a new sort. In part this was because they were in some way influenced by the broadening democratic concepts that in 1829 triumphed in Andrew Jackson’s inauguration as president. In part it was because, in this Romantic period of emphasis upon native scenes and characters in many literatures, they put much of America into their books.

Melville was for a time a neighbor and associate of Hawthorne. With Hawthorne and Whitman, Melville is regarded as one of the great imaginative writers of the American Renaissance. The novels and poetry of this group left a permanent imprint on American literature. After relatively little schooling, Melville went to sea; a whaling ship, as he put it, was his “Yale College and his Harvard.” His first books were fiction in the guise of factual writing based upon his experiences as a sailor—Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847); so were such later works as Redburn (1849) and White-Jacket (1850). Between 1846 and 1851, however, Melville’s reading in philosophy and literary classics, as well as in Hawthorne’s allegorical and symbolic writings, gave him new interests and aims. The new techniques came to fruition in Moby Dick; or, The Whale (1851), a richly symbolic work, complex but brilliantly integrated. Later in his career, Melville showed sporadic flashes of the genius that created Moby Dick in short stories, Benito Cereno—a masterpiece of its genre—and others, in the psychological novel Pierre (1852), and in the novelette Billy Budd, Foretopman (written 1891, published 1924).

An ardent singer of the praise of Manhattan, Whitman saw less of the dark side of life than Melville did. He was a believer in Jacksonian democracy, in the splendor of the common American citizen. Inspired by the Romantic concept of a poet as prophet and also by the Transcendental philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Whitman in 1855 published the first edition of Leaves of Grass. Speaking in part to the desire for an authentic and unique national literature, its preface declared, “Here are the roughs and beards and space and ruggedness and nonchalance that the soul loves.” As years passed, nine revised and expanded editions of this monumental poetic work were published. Containing “Song of Myself,” “I Sing the Body Electric,” and his Civil War poems, Drum-Taps, this autobiography in verse was intended to show the ideas, beliefs, emotions, and experiences of the common man in a great period of American individualism. Whitman had a hard time winning a following because he was frank and unconventional in his Transcendental thinking and in his treatment of topics such as sexual passion between men, because he used free verse rather than rhymed or regularly metered verse, and because his poems were not conventionally organized. Nevertheless, he steadily gained the approval of critics and in time came to be recognized as one of the great poets of America.

One of the most important influences in the period was that of the Transcendentalists, centered in the village of Concord, Massachusetts (not far from Cambridge), and including Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Bronson Alcott (father of children’s author Louisa May Alcott), George Ripley, Orestes Brownson, Jones Very, and Margaret Fuller. The Transcendentalists contributed to the founding of a new national culture based on native elements. They advocated reforms in church, state, and society, contributing to the rise of free religion and the abolition movement and to the formation of various utopian communities, such as Brook Farm.

The way for this group had been prepared by the rise of a theological system, Unitarianism, which early in the 19th century had replaced Calvinism as the faith of a large share of the New Englanders. Emerson, most famous of the Concord philosophers, started as a Unitarian minister but found even that liberal doctrine too confining for his broad beliefs. He became a Transcendentalist who, like other ancient and modern Platonists, trusted to insights transcending logic and experience for revelations of the deepest truths. His scheme of things ranged from the lowest objects and most practical chores to soaring flights of imagination and inspired beliefs. His Essays (1841–44), Representative Men (1850), and English Traits (1856) were thoughtful and poetic explanations of his beliefs; and his rough-hewn lyrics, packed with thought and feeling, were as close to 17th-century Metaphysical poems as any produced in his own time.

An associate of Emerson with a salty personality of his own and an individual way of thinking, Thoreau, a sometime surveyor, laborer, and naturalist, was closer to the earthy and the practical than even Emerson was. He also was more of a humorist—a dry Yankee commentator with a flair for paradoxical phrases and sentences. Finally, he was a learned man, widely read in both Western and Eastern classics. These qualities gave distinction to A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) and to Walden (1854). The latter is a record of his experiences and ponderings during the time he lived in a hut by Walden Pond—a defense of his belief that modern people should simplify their demands if need be to “suck out all the marrow of life.” In his essay “Civil Disobedience” (1849, Thoreau expounded his anarchistic views of government, insisting that if an injustice of government is “of such a nature that it requires injustice to another [you should] break the law [and] let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.”

Another New Englander, poet Emily Dickinson was an outlier of American Romanticism. A shy, playful, odd personality, she allowed practically none of her writings to be published during her lifetime. However, she shared many of them with her sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert Dickinson, a cultivated reader who inspired a number of poems that reveal a Gothic flair: “She dealt her pretty words like Blades— / How glittering they shone.” Not until 1890, four years after Dickinson’s death, was the first book of her poems published, to be followed at intervals by other collections. Later poets were to be influenced by her individual techniques—use of imperfect, or eye, rhymes, avoidance of regular rhythms, and a tendency to pack brief stanzas with cryptic meanings. Like the Southern poet Sidney Lanier, she rediscovered the value of conceits for setting forth her thoughts and feelings. Such poems as “The Snake,” “I Like to See It Lap the Miles,” “The Chariot,” “Farther in Summer than the Birds,” and “There’s a Certain Slant of Light” represented her unusual talent at its best.

Latin American Romanticism

The first Latin Americans to write under the sway of Romanticism were poets such as the Cuban José María de Heredia, who had begun by mastering Neoclassical poetic forms. Heredia still wrote odes in the Neoclassical manner, but the emotional charge of his poetry, the presentation of a self astonished by the beauty and power of nature, and his espousal of the cause for national independence were Romantic to the core. Romanticism in Latin America was coeval with the movements that brought about independence from Spain to all Latin American countries, save, ironically, Heredia’s Cuba and the rest of the Caribbean.

The Venezuelan Andrés Bello, who was imbued with the Neoclassical spirit, had written Silva a la agricultura de la zona tórrida (1826; “Ode to Agriculture in the Torrid Zone”), a Virgilian poem that lauds nature for its generous sustenance of humanity. The Ecuadorian José Joaquín de Olmedo wrote in praise of the heroes of South American independence, as in his 1825 ode “La victoria de Junín: canto a Bolívar” (“The Victory at Junín: A Song to Bolívar”). Heredia, on the other hand, wrote a Romantic ode to Niagara Falls, “Oda al Niágara” (“Ode to Niagara”), the theme of which is the water’s violent beauty. A similar poem addressed to a hurricane, “En una tempestad” (“In a Storm”), expressed his awe and fear before the wantonly destructive wind. An exile who lived in the United States and Mexico and died at age 62 in France, Heredia was the very embodiment of the Romantic outcast, horrified by the abuses of established authority, which in this case was the Spanish government of Cuba. In his “Himno del desterrado” (“Hymn of the Exile”) he sings about the clash between Cuba’s physical beauty and the outrages committed in its immoral political life.

In contrast to Heredia, the Argentine Esteban Echeverría, who had left his country voluntarily, returned in the early 1830s from studying in Paris to become an active promoter of democracy and Romantic literature. Argentina had become an independent country, but, as happened elsewhere in South America, it had gone from foreign rule to domestic despotism. Echeverría became an opponent of the Juan Manuel de Rosas dictatorship (1835–52). In 1837 he founded the Asociación de Mayo (“May Association,” named for the month of Argentina’s independence), a group of liberal intellectuals who sought a national literature reflective of their culture and society. By 1841 Echeverría had to leave Argentina as an exile. He went to Uruguay, where he remained until his death in 1851. Although he was a prolific writer and pamphleteer, Echeverría’s place in literary history is secured by a poem and a short story. The poem, “La cautiva” (“The Captive,” included in Rimas [1837]), is about a white couple, María and Brian, abducted by a group of Indigenous people in the Pampas, the Argentine plain. His story “El matadero” (“The Slaughterhouse”) was written between 1838 and 1840, but it was not published until 30 years later, after Echeverría’s death. It is a political allegory directed against Rosas: a cultivated young man, liberal in manner and dress, is brutally slain by thugs who frequent the Buenos Aires slaughterhouse.

But the towering figure of Argentine—and Latin American—literature of the mid-19th century was Domingo Faustino Sarmiento. His Civilización y barbarie: Vida de Juan Facundo Quiroga (1845; Life in the Argentine Republic in the Age of the Tyrants) is arguably the most important book ever written by a Latin American. It was written during Sarmiento’s second exile in Chile, as a political pamphlet against Rosas. A wide-ranging meditation on Argentine culture, the book centers on the figure of strongman Facundo Quiroga, whom Sarmiento offers as the prototype of the rural strongman who might evolve into a Rosas. Sarmiento is attracted and repulsed by the gauchos, the Argentine cowboys from whose midst Facundo emerged. His loving descriptions of the Pampas and of the nomadic gauchos are among the most powerful in Latin American literature. But Sarmiento wanted Argentina to be modern, to adopt the ways of his admired United States, and to reject the gaucho culture that led to a tyrant like Rosas. The clash between “barbarism” (rural, native culture) and “civilization” (urban, European-influenced culture) that Sarmiento saw at the core of Argentine life became a formula for characterizing all of Latin American culture. It is, with his great book, Sarmiento’s most enduring legacy. Sarmiento was elected president of Argentina in 1868, and he remained in power until 1874, beginning a tradition of important writers becoming presidents that endures in Latin America to the present day.

The Romantic preference for national themes, local landscapes, and regional human types continued with an epic poem by Juan Zorrilla de San Martín, Tabaré (1886; Tabaré: An Indian Legend of Uruguay), which depicts the fate of the Charrúa people, defeated by the Spanish invaders. The high point of this trend of portraying Indigenous types was reached in Argentina by José Hernández in the gaucho epic Martín Fierro (1872–79; Martín Fierro: An Epic of the Argentine, also translated as The Gaucho Martin Fierro). It was the best of the gaucho literature genre—a body of literature that included Rafael Obligado’s Santos Vega (1887), on a famous minstrel, and the comical Fausto (1866) by Estanislao del Campo.

The Caribbean counterpart of this literature was the Cuban antislavery novel, in which the wretched living conditions of enslaved Africans toiling in the production of sugar are depicted. The masterpiece of this group of novels was Cecilia Valdés (1882; Cecilia Valdés; or, Angel’s Hill: A Novel of Cuban Customs), by the Cuban exile Cirilo Villaverde, perhaps the best Latin American novel of the 19th century. Villaverde’s only competition comes from María (1867; María: A South American Romance), by the Colombian Jorge Isaacs, and Amalia (1851–55; Amalia: A Romance of the Argentine), by the Argentine José Mármol. Villaverde’s vast narrative centers on the heroine, Cecilia, a light-skinned woman of mixed African and European ancestry who can pass for white and is in love with Leonardo, white, rich, and, unbeknownst to them, her half-brother. Cecilia Valdés is rich in details of Cuban life under Spanish domination, and it is a scathing denunciation of slavery.

Romantic in spirit, Cecilia Valdés is cast in the mold of 19th-century realism, a combination that in Latin America produced a version of a peculiar new genre, the cuadro de costumbres, or “sketch of local customs” (a form of costumbrismo). These brief, descriptive essays depicted the lives of rural folk, or of poor urban dwellers, whose traditional customs differed from the modern ways of those writing them. A uniquely Peruvian version was created by Ricardo Palma, whose sketches are often brief narratives that he called tradiciones. Volumes of his Tradiciones peruanas appeared between 1872 and 1910. (English-language selections from them appear in The Knights of the Cape and Thirty-seven Other Selections from the Tradiciones Peruanas of Ricardo Palma [1945].) They occupy a prominent place in Latin American literary history.