Skip to main content

Agustin Duran Biography

Agustín Durán

(Madrid, 1793-1862) Spanish writer.He is considered one of the introducers of romanticism in Spain and one of the initiators of the historical criticism of literature.He is the author of Discourse on the influence that modern criticism has had on the decline of the ancient Spanish theater (1828), of Trovas in ancient Castilian parla (1829), of studies about Lope de Vega and Tirso de Molina and legends.

Agustín Durán

He studied at the seminary in Vergara and then at the Faculty of Law of the University of Seville.He practiced law in Valladolid and later professed public education, where he would achieve a prominent position.On the death of Fernando VII, he received several offers, but he preferred to sacrifice his future career, which would have been facilitated by his social position, to philological studies.He became director of the National Library, a position in which he was able to dedicate himself to his activity as bibliographer and researcher and text editor.Disciple of Alberto Lista and friend of Manuel José Quintana and Bartolomé José Gallardo, he was a follower of the famous Hispanist Juan Nicolás Böhl de Faber.

Many critics judge him to be the introducer of Romanticism in Spain due to the Discourse on the influence that modern criticism has had on the decline of the ancient Spanish theater ( 1828), in which, before any other scholar in the country, he emphasized the importance of popular romances (which he gathered in the volumes of the General Romancero , published between 1828 and 1832, and in a new edition enlarged in the period 1832-1844) and the theater of the Golden Age.More perhaps than Alcalá Galiano's preface to the Foundling Moro of the Duke of Rivas, Agustín's Speech Durán can be considered as the manifesto of Romanticism in Spain.Durán sums up and puts an end, at the beginning of the new literary and cultural movement, to the whole long discussion about the theater that had been the center of the literary battles of the second half of the 18th century between "castizos" and "Frenchified".

The most notable element of the Discourse is the conviction, general to all Romanticism, that poetry springs from the people, in its first constitution in unity of the epic songs that later they are gradually absorbed by the cultured element, but they continue to evolve (thus, the "romances") in the village, secretly feeding the vein of the poets, who often unknowingly borrow something from popular art.And the creation of popular art is the entire "ancient Spanish theater", "our classical theater", as he says, a theater profoundly different from the cult and cold French theater of the literati, because it introduces its roots in feelings, traditions and the legends born of the people.

Lacking in depth philological research, the text of the Discourse is nevertheless full of remarkable and precise observations, though perhaps disordered, and constitutes a passionate and lively defense of Spanish literature against the formalist critique of the French.There are philosophical considerations alongside stylistic observations, and on ancient criteria the postulates of Romanticism are inserted; literary criticism and historical vision merge and alternate.The Discourse was rightly included in the edition of the General Romancero that Durán compiled to demonstrate the inexhaustible source of poetry of these popular songs which, derived from epic poems, have been continued in the oral tradition for centuries and must be considered as proof of the "poetic nature" of the people.

Among his other works we can mention Trovas in old Castilian parla (1829) , Trovas to the Queen (1832), Spanish Talía (1843), Collection of sainetes of Don Ramón de la Cruz (1843) and The legend of the three grapefruits of the orchard of Love (1856).In 1834 he entered the Academy.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Giacomo Fauser Biography

Giacomo Fauser (Novara, 1892- id ., 1971) Italian industrialist.With studies in chemical engineering, he carried out interesting research in the field of production processes by synthesis of nitrogen compounds, especially nitrogen fertilizers.

The history and origin of the Earth

The planet Earth 4.5 billion years ago was a mass of clustered rocks whose core melted the planet.Over time it dried and cooled to form a crust solid and consistent.After a long cooling process, the formation of gases and the interaction with the air is the atmosphere . Index of the article Formation of the solar system The scientific studies confirm that it does around of 13.8 billion years there was a big explosion that they called Big Bang .The exorbitant force that was unleashed dispersed all the matter that was in all possible directions at speeds too exorbitant.As time went by, they moved away from the place of the explosion and slowed down.The nearby matter stayed for p roast to be what are now the galaxies . In the immediate vicinity of the limit of our galaxy is the Via Lactea. These fractions of matter were condensed in a dense cloud about 5,000 million years ago.All this matter was constituting a huge mass thanks to gravitational forces, until a sphere ...

The medieval knight in combat

At the beginning of the eleventh century, some warriors on horseback distinguished themselves from the mass of free men.Why? Between the 8th and 9th centuries, the methods of combat had been radically transformed, and only a small number of people knew how to master the select service of weapons and become a knight . If we see in a movie an army full of thousands of thousands of knights, or a man who gets on a horse and automatically fights like a medieval knight , we must never lose sight of the fact that this is pure fiction and, it goes without saying, an insult to the work and education that the Knights of the Middle Ages carried out for years. Being a gentleman was extremely difficult .First of all, it required money.Horses, weapons , and the armors were among the most expensive objects of that time. The cavalry was increasingly taking center stage in the story medieval , was not always made up of powerful warriors and lords. The Carolingian fighter In the time ...

George dewey Biography

George Dewey (Montpelier, 1837-Washington, 1917) American admiral, famous for commanding the North American fleet that defeated the Spanish in Manila Bay.He began his military studies at the Norwich School (New Hampshire), and in 1854 he entered the Annapolis Naval Academy, where he graduated in 1858.After serving on the steam frigate USS Wabash bound for the Mediterranean fleet, in 1861 he returned to the Naval Academy to obtain the rank of lieutenant. George Dewey When the civil war broke out that same year, he was assigned to the Mississippi frigate with the mission of participating in the blockade of the coast of the Confederacy, and commanding this ship took part in the Battle of New Orleans (April 1862).In 1863 he fought under the orders of Admiral David Farragut at the Battle of Port Hudson, in which the Mississippi was destroyed.Later he was appointed commander of the Monongahela, flagship of Admiral Farragut, and of the Kearsarge, in which he served when the war ended. ...

Isabel from Portugal Biography

Isabel of Portugal (?-Arévalo, 1496) Queen of Castile (1447-1454).She was the daughter of the infant Juan de Portugal and his wife, Princess Isabel de Barcelos, and the granddaughter of King Juan I of Portugal.On July 22, 1447, she married King Juan II of Castile in Madrigal de las Altas Torres (Ávila).The marriage between the Portuguese princess and the Castilian king had been agreed a year earlier by the constable Don Álvaro de Luna, valid of Juan II and true arbiter of the kingdom's policy.The almighty constable intended with this dynastic alliance to reinforce the political ties that united Castile and Portugal against the common enemy: the Catalan-Aragonese Crown, then headed by Alfonso V el Magnánimo, head of the infants of Aragon, who disputed power in Castile to Luna. Don Álvaro exerted an almost hypnotic influence on the Castilian monarch, a man, on the other hand, of weak character and little political vision.The king was reluctant to remarry, since he was forty-two ...

Carmen de Icaza Biography

Carmen de Icaza (Madrid, 1904-1979) Spanish novelist.She was the daughter of the Mexican poet and academic Francisco A.de Icaza, at the time his country's ambassador in Madrid.Her very childhood was spent in a literary environment to which her father's gathering contributed to a great extent, which was attended by Juan Ramón Jiménez, José Ortega y Gasset, Rubén Darío and Amado Nervo, also a Mexican diplomat.Later, her father's career would take her to various cities in Europe.Especially important was her stay in Berlin, where she received a careful education in classical and modern languages. Carmen de Icaza In 1925, and again in Spain, her father.The family's lack of resources leads her to apply for a position at the newspaper El Sol, thanks to her father's friendship with Ortega, the newspaper's founder.It deals with the feminine page, from which it echoes the problems of women.He immediately began to collaborate in ABC, Blanco y Negro y Ya, of whose wr...

Il Verrocchio Biography

Il Verrocchio (Andrea di Michele Cioni; Florence, 1435-Venice, 1488) Italian goldsmith, sculptor and painter.The celebrity of the Florentine artist Andrea del Verrocchio is mainly due to his sculptural work, which continued the naturalistic tradition begun by Donatello within a greater interest in the graceful and lightness of the pose. Andrea Cioni, Verrocchio's real name, was born in Florence in 1435.Although his life is little known, it is known with certainty that he studied goldsmithing and painting with Giuliano Verrocchi (from whom he took his name) and Alesso Baldovinetti , respectively, and sculpture with Antonio Rossellino and, according to some authors, Donatello. Although works from his early years are not preserved, he must have had considerable prestige, since in 1665 he created a sculpture workshop that also accepted painting and goldsmith commissions, and a year later, as a result of the Donatello's death, he became the favorite artist of the Medici famil...

Isabel de Farnesio Biography

Isabel de Farnesio (Parma, present-day Italy, 1692-Aranjuez, Spain, 1766) Queen of Spain (1714-1746).Daughter of Edward III, Duke of Parma, in 1714 she became the second wife of Philip V.Endowed with great culture and undoubted attractiveness, despite suffering the consequences of smallpox, she knew how to win the king's will and impose his own criteria in court.Thus, he managed to exert great influence on Spanish politics: he removed pro-French elements from the court and sponsored the rise of Giulio Alberoni and Johan Willem Ripperdá.His foreign policy was centered, above all, in Italy, where he struggled to locate his children.In this way, Carlos (the future Carlos III of Spain) obtained Naples, and Felipe, Milan and Parma.After the death of her husband, she managed to maintain her influence in Italian politics, and came to exercise the Spanish regency when her stepson Fernando (Fernando VI) died without succession in 1759, waiting for her son Carlos to arrive from Naples to ...

Tibet - History and Culture of Tibet in the 20th century

As we said in the previous article when we talked about the new Chinese repression in the Tibet , this region has lived through centuries of continuous invasions that have only served to obscure its memory and slowly exterminate its culture. The first Mongols, the English, the Indians and the Chinese , have razed their lands, devastating an already poor population in itself, and the monasteries and the Tibetans themselves are suffering the end of their pure race, because by their blood they already run the traces of the different empires that have dominated it to the point that two thirds of their population is Chinese. Little Tibet is known before the tenth century.Perhaps it was in those centuries when this region could be considered totally independent.But it was in the eleventh century II when they suffered their first invasion: that of the Mongol Empire .While it is true that during the centuries that the Mongol Empire dominated Tibet, the country's government enjo...