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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.

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