The book “For a history of literary thought in Spain”, by the professor of the department of General Linguistics and Theory of Literature of the Universidad of Granada Antonio Chicharro Chamorro starts with a work about an academic oration of Soto de Rojas (his Speech on Poetics). Chicharro includes in this volume edited by the Spanish National Research Council, essays written “always from a historical perspective, both when proceeding to its analysis and when integrating them in a volume in order to nourish a history of literary thought in Spain”, according to the author.
The volume is structured in different essays in which the author deals with classicist poetics, realistic poetics, literary and historical thought of the fin-de-siècle modernity, sociological theory and criticism of rehumanizer poetics, critic theory, formalist and materialist renovation of the studies, the new art of poetry, literary studies and their situation in present Spain. Professor Chicharro offers us a historical journey through the literary thought in our country starting from the Golden Age through the analysis of a theoretical text hardly studied by the few historians of aesthetic and literary ideas, to the contemporaneous history of literary thought in Spain, with a part devoted to the analysis of the studies on literature and society.
A thought of materialist roots
In the same way, the author deals with the sociological literary theory and criticism which, according to him, “is indebted, somehow, to the theoretical approaches and principles materialistic, historical and dialectic, this is, Marxist. A balance more in the sense of indication of certain results than, logically, of a whole process”.
For this reason, he says, “I limit myself to pointing out the magnitude of a critic and theoretical activity that, with elementality and scarce originality, by the way, at least during several decades, has been indebted to a thought of anti-metaphysical roots and progress which has struggled to understand literature as a complex social phenomenon with a praxic aim”.
But also re-humanizer poetics of the middle of the century are object of attention in this volume. In this ambit, Antonio Chicharro has focused on the careful reading of the poetics of the renowned and influential Consulted Anthology of Young Spanish Poetry, of 1952, dealing with the theoretical space and function of the essential poetics, the poetics of the quoted anthology, as well as of their tendencies and their common and distinguishing aspects.
“On the other hand, Miguel Fernández’s criticism of Gabriel Celaya’s poetry is quite illuminating, which contributes to the knowledge both of the social-realistic poetics and poetry of the author of Cantos iberos and of a critic behaviour”. In other chapters, the author tackles Francisco Ayala, Dámaso Alonso, Juan Benet or Antonio Carvajal.
Reference
Prof Antonio Chicharro Chamorro. Dpt General Linguistics and Theory of Literature
Phone number. 958 243 593 / 958 246 372.
E-mail. achichar@ugr.es
