Dominican Republic literature

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Literature of the Dominican Republic refers to works written in the country or outside of it by writers,^[1] either by nationality or ancestry. Although one can only speak rigorously of Dominican literature in relation to works written after Dominican Independence, it is customary to include the literary production of the colonial era. During the colonial period, Cristóbal de Llerena wrote the interlude Octava de Corpus Christi and Leonor de Ovando wrote some sonnets, which is why she is considered the first woman to write poetry on this side of the world. Modern Dominican literature began with the founding of the first cultural society Lovers of Letters, to which Manuel de Jesús Galván, Jose Gabriel García, Francisco Javier Angulo Guridi, Manuel de Jesus Heredia, Manuel Rodríguez Objío, among others, belonged.^[2]

The literature of the Dominican Republic continues to be in flux and in search of greater projection within and outside the national territory, although Dominican authors have cultivated the various manifestations of literary work, reflecting in their works the mixture of Spanish, African and Taíno elements that occurs in the Caribbean and the influence of successive emigrations for political and economic reasons. Poetry, novels, short stories, essays and history have expressed the political, social and economic discourse of the country, which since the feat of discovery has been permeated by multiple currents of thought, especially European and American initially, and from the Far East in the productions of some writers of the late twentieth century.

Poetry has had prominent exponents. The 19th century was one of the most robust for the genre, although the 20th century was even more prolific and meant the evolution towards its maturity, with the emergence of the avant-garde movements.

Although it developed late, Dominican novels have had important exponents in the country. Emerging under the influence of French romanticism of Victor Hugo, it is possible to highlight three important moments in it according to its typology and theme: the sugarcane novel, the biblical novel, and the costumbrista novel.

The short story has had more significance than the novel and its main exponent in the 20th century has been Juan Bosch, master of the genre in Latin America. The writer and politician wrote three significant collections of stories entitled Stories written before exile, Stories written in exile and More stories written in exile. The modern short story began in the second phase of the 19th century, that is, late in comparison to other countries.

For decades, Dominican intellectuals have had in the essay a stage that they have expanded and developed with talent. The political essays of the independentists, the conservatives and the restorers stand out. One of its best exponents in the international arena was Pedro Henríquez Ureña, renowned author of academic essays on literary topics.^[3] The local passion for historical subjects, especially those dealing with the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo and other transcendental political episodes, has influenced the development of historians of stature in different periods of the Dominican Republic.

The Corripio Foundation and the State Secretariat for Culture award the National Literature Prize every year.^[4]

The outstanding trilogy of Dominican poetry of the 19th century is made up of Salomé Ureña, José Joaquín Pérez and Gastón Fernando Deligne. They are the three pillars on which the poetry of the period rests in its patriotic, indigenist and psychological aspects. But it was not until the 20th century when poetry reached the category of modern, with the emergence of the avant-garde movements.

Poetry is the most cultivated genre since Manuel María Valencia, the first romantic poet, through Fabio Fiallo and others who assimilated the influences of European literary currents, to the incipient emergence of modernism embodied in three important figures: Valentín Giró, Ricardo Pérez Alfonseca and Osvaldo Bazil. Darío 's influences diminished with the appearance of posthumism, around 1921. Otilio Vigil Díaz, who introduced the avant-garde in Dominican literature, was a great renovator of national lyric poetry, influenced by French symbolism. Thus, he founded the first poetic movement of a unipersonal nature, to which Zacarías Espinal joined and which he called Vedrinismo because in his verses he tried to do the pirouettes that the French aviator Jules Vedrines did in the air.

Vigil Díaz introduced modernity by creating free verse and the prose poem with his books Góndolas (1912) and Galeras de Pafos (1921). After him, Dominican poetry experienced another great moment represented by Domingo Moreno Jimenes, when he founded, together with the philosopher Andrés Avelino and the poet Rafael Augusto Zorrilla, the aforementioned posthumism. They wrote a manifesto that added to the avant-garde a poetry of a nationalist character that rescued the local color, the landscape and the identity of the Dominican man. With this school, the Dominican poetic tradition was renewed to incubate new voices that strengthened it.

This movement was followed by the ‘‘Surprised Poetry’’ movement, the most dynamic group with a great aesthetic openness, made up of great poets such as Franklin Mieses Burgos, Mariano Lebrón Saviñón, Antonio Fernández Spencer, Aída Cartagena Portalatín, Freddy Gatón Arce, among others. This group of poets had as their motto poetry with the universal man, contrary to posthumanism. This was followed by the generation of the Independents of 40, made up of Manuel del Cabral, Héctor Incháustegui Cabral, Pedro Mir and Tomás Hernández Franco, who published emblematic poems such as Compadre Mon, There is a country in the world, Poem of a single anguish and Yelidá. From those surprises emerged another group of poets called the Generation of '48, made up of, among others, Victor Villegas, Maximo Aviles Blonda, Lupo Hernandez Rueda, Luis Alfredo Torres, Rafael Valera Benitez and Abelardo Vicioso.

In the 1970s, after the fall of the Trujillo regime, writers from the Generation of the Sixties emerged with Marcio Veloz Maggiolo, Ramón Francisco, René del Risco Bermúdez, Jeannette Miller and Miguel Alfonseca. In the same decade, and as a consequence of the April Revolution of 1965, the movement called ‘‘Postwar Poets’’ (or ‘‘Young Poetry’’) was born, with Mateo Morrison, Andrés L. Mateo, Enriquillo Sánchez, Tony Raful, Alexis Gómez Rosa, Enrique Eusebio and Soledad Álvarez, among others.

In the 1980s a poetic movement appeared in various tendencies, shaking the literary establishment of the moment (the post-war disenchantment) and laying the foundations for a break (which did not occur immediately) with that generation. The movement led to the formation of groups such as the César Vallejo Literary Workshop: Juan Briján, José Mármol, Miguel Jiménez, Tomás Castro, Dionisio de Jesús, César Zapata, Leopoldo Minaya, Rafael García Romero, Evans Lewis, Juan Manuel Sepúlveda, Roberto Reyes, Marcial Mota, Julio Mercedes, Zaida Corniel, Irene Santos, Carmen Sánchez, Dulce Ureña, José Siris, Ylonka Perdomo, Josemon Tejada and many others.

During this period, the poets of Y Punto (made up basically of publicists, painters and poets) and El Círculo Francisco Urondo, made up of León Félix Batista, Atilano Pimentel, Víctor Bidó, José Alejandro Pena, Juan de la Cruz, Nicolás Guevara and Miriam Ventura, emerged. Discussions and contrasts of place between some poets and others arose, and the Circle of Women Poets of the Dominican Republic was born, made up of Chiqui Vicioso, Carmen Imbert Brugal, among others.

The tendencies were varied, as well as independent voices of great quality, such as Sally Rodríguez and Martha Rivera-Garrido, the tendencies and the entire literary spectrum were united with their distances and differences, reaching the point of identifying feminine poetry, the Poetry of the Crisis and the poetry of Thought. Migration played an important role, because many poets dispersed and settled in Puerto Rico, Germany, and the United States, weakening some spaces and closing others permanently. Another group of important poets emerged, such as Ángela Pena, Aurora Arias and Marianela Medrano, who formed the second Circle of Women Poets of the Dominican Republic. Some poets of the 1990s included: Medar Serrata, Ramon Saba and Cesar Sanchez Beras. (Notable transitional poets from the late 1970s and early 1980s include José Enrique García and Cayo Claudio Espinal).

The first novel written by a Dominican was El montero (published in Paris, France in 1856), by Pedro Francisco Bonó, although some literary historians say that the first Dominican novel is Los amores de los indios (published in Havana, Cuba in 1843) by Alejandro Angulo Guridi or even Cecilia, by the same author, which, although published incomplete in the Sunday weekly El Progreso (numbers 1-3 and 5-8, 1853) had come out earlier in the newspaper El Eco de Villaclara, in Cuba and as this writer and journalist remained in that country until 1851, the novel is from that year or even earlier.^[5] Then followed by La fantasma de Higüey (1857, Havana) by Francisco Angulo Guridi, Alejandro's brother. The first Dominican novel printed in the Dominican Republic corresponds to Francisco: La Campana del Higo: Dominican tradition, which was published by the García Hermanos printing press in 1866.

Until the 21st century, the Dominican novel has not had the same strength as other genres such as poetry, essays and short stories, despite the great indigenist novel Enriquillo (1879) by Manuel de Jesús Galván.

Dominican novels have been classified into three major periods that correspond to novels written before 1930, those written from 1930 to 1960, and those written after 1960, relating this classification to the historical events of the nation rather than to firm literary movements.^[6]

The novel, unlike poetry, is a late genre in the Dominican Republic, which emerged under the influence of the French romanticism of Victor Hugo. A great milestone in Dominican novels is Only Ashes You Will Find (bolero) by Pedro Vergés, with which he won the Blasco Ibáñez Prize and the Critics' Prize in Spain in 1980.

The Dominican novel shows three important moments according to its typology and theme: the sugarcane novel, represented by Cañas y bueyes by Francisco Moscoso Puello, Over by Ramón Marrero Aristy and Ginger by Andrés Pérez Cabral.

Then there is the Biblical Novel by Carlos Esteban Deive, Marcio Veloz Maggiolo and Ramón Emilio Reyes and the propagandistic novel like The Enemies of the Earth by Andrés Requena, Trementina, clerén and bongó and costumbrist novels like The Cacica by Rafael Damirón, Baní or Engracia and Antoñica by Francisco Gregorio Billini, The Crafty by Juan Bosch and the trilogy by Héctor García Godoy, composed by Rufinito, Guanuma and Alma dominicana.

Among the most acclaimed novelists with the greatest international projection are Marcio Veloz Maggiolo, author of a dozen novels, a versatile writer, as he has also cultivated the short story, the historical-archaeological essay and theater; Aída Cartagena Portalatín, who together with the first, founded the experimental novel, Veloz Maggiolo with Los ángeles de hueso (1967) and Aída with Escalera para Electra (1970). Other novels worthy of mention in this period are La sangre by Tulio Manuel Cestero, Over by Ramón Marrero Aristy, La mañosa by Juan Bosch, Biografía difusa de Sombra Castañeda by Veloz Maggiolo and La balada de Alfonsina Bairán by Andrés L. Mateo.

In the 1980s, the following stand out: René Rodríguez Soriano, Ángela Hernández, Rafael García Romero, Pedro Camilo, Avelino Stanley, Ramón Tejada Holguín, César Zapata, Manuel García Cartagena and in the 1990s, Martha Rivera-Garrido, who won the Casa de Teatro International Novel Prize with I've Forgotten Your Name (translated into English by Harvard University professor Mary Berg), Emilia Pereyra, Pedro Antonio Valdez, Pastor de Moya, José Carvajal, José Acosta, Luis Martín Gómez, among others.

Stanley has a vast narrative work, among which stand out Cathedral of Libido, Dead Time and The Shots. Pereyra, journalist and narrator, has written The Green Crime, Ashes of Wanting, Cocktail with Frenzy, The Cry of the Drum, in addition to the short story collection The Inapelable Design of God. Santos is the author of Memoirs of a Single Man, Diabolical Passion and The Second Resurrected. In 2019, Franklin Gutiérrez published The Dark Face of the American Dream, a novel where the theme of emigration is expressed from multiple perspectives, without obstacles or inhibitions. Critics have described it as a "great novel of emigration." The Dark Face of the American Dream won the 2020 National Novel Prize, awarded by the Ministry of Culture of the Dominican Republic.

The short story is a genre that has had better luck than the novel, since we have the privilege of having a master of the genre in Latin America such as Juan Bosch, who wrote three significant collections of short stories entitled Stories written before exile, Stories written in exile and More stories written in exile . The modern short story began in the second phase of the 19th century, that is, late, judging by other countries. The first short story known is El garito (1854) by Ángulo Guridi.

The first legends and tales of oral tradition that reach the island come from the conquerors, through their intellectuals and religious figures who spread them throughout the national territory. In the 19th century, the first narratives were of a costumbrista nature, and the main figure of this trend is César Nicolás Penson, author of Cosas añejas. Already in the 20th century we have the figure of Fabio Fiallo, who writes modernist stories influenced by his friend Rubén Darío with Cuentos fragilees (1908), as well as Tulio Manuel Cestero and Virginia Elena Ortea. Other important exponents of the genre are Jose Ramon Lopez, Rene del Risco, Virgil Diaz Grullon, Hilma Contreras, Sanz Lajara, Jose Rijo, Diogenes Valdez, Pedro Peix, among others. From the costumbrista and socio-realist themes of Bosch, included figures such as Socrates Nolasco, Nestor Caro and Marrero Aristy.

During the Trujillo regime, writers from the Generation of the Sixties emerged with Marcio Veloz Maggiolo, Ramón Francisco, René del Risco, Jeannette Miller and Miguel Alfonseca. In the same decade, and as a consequence of the April War of 1965, the movement called Postwar Poets (or Young Poetry) emerged, with Mateo Morrison, Andrés L. Mateo, Enriquillo Sánchez, Tony Raful, Alexis Gómez Rosa, Enrique Eusebio and Soledad Álvarez, among others. In the 1980s, a poetic movement appeared that broke with that generation by ignoring the ideological and the historical circumstance, creating a poetry of thought and reflection on other topics: not only the social, but the philosophical, death and the erotic. Among these poets are Leandro Morales, José Mármol, Plinio Chahín, Dionisio de Jesús, Médar Serrata, Víctor Bidó, José Alejandro Peña, etc. It is worth highlighting transitional poets, such as José Enrique García, author of the book El fabulador and Cayo Claudio Espinal, creator of the Contextualist Movement and author of the books Utopía de los relaciones, Banquetes de aflicción, Comedio (entre gravedad y risa), Las políticas culturales en la República Dominicana, La mampara and Clave de estambre. Also transitional, in 1993, Preeminencia del tiempo appeared, characterized by an aesthetic and stylistic syncretism that integrates the classical canon with the various avant-garde schools.

Among the Dominican writers who stand out in the present time are the novelists Junot Díaz, who lives in the United States, uses English as the language of literary writing and won the Putlitzer Prize with his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; Pedro Antonio Valdez (1968); Reynolds Andújar (1977), winner of the 2015 Alba Narrative Prize with his novel Useless Gestures; the poets Frank Báez (also a narrator) who is the only Dominican on the last list of 2017 in Bogotá39, José Mármol (1960),^[7] Among the women stand out Ángela Hernández (1954, author of Mudanza de los Sentidos, Charamicos and other works), winner of the 2016 National Literature Prize; Rita Indiana, writer and popular singer; also worth mentioning the poetesses Minerva del Risco (daughter of the bard René del Risco); Chiqui Vicioso (National Theatre Award 1997), a feminist who although she began publishing in the early 1980s has continued to be active in this century writing essays dedicated mainly to women. It would be appropriate to mention here also the journalist Víctor Manuel Ramos, author of La vida pasajeros, a novel that won the 2010 literary contest of the North American Academy of the Spanish Language in the United States and that deals with a Dominican theme despite being written in New York .^[8]

By the modern 21st century, the so-called Transmillenium Lit movement emerged in Dominican literature, with an avant-garde and/or experimental tendency.

A prose writing on a specific topic without scientific pretensions or a definitive conclusion. The term essay was originally used to designate those experimental writings that oscillated between science and literature . But that conception has gradually changed, to the point that currently the category of essay is given to those texts that through the exposition, discussion and evaluation of a given topic aim to validate the thesis presented in it. The initiator of the genre was the Frenchman Michel de Montaigne, who in 1580 published a series of writings about his personal confessions entitled Essais (Essays). Later, in 1597, the Englishman Francis Bacon (1561-1626) published his work Essays, Religious Meditations, Topics of Persuasion and Discussion. Among other European proponents of the essay are: Joseph Addison, Gaddhold Lessing, Johann Goethe, Thomas Carlyle, Thomas Macaulay, Hippolyte Taine, Paul Valéry, Thomas Mann and Gyorgy Lukacs.

In Spain, where the essay truly took shape in the 19th century, the essayists who gained fame were Ángel Ganivet, Miguel de Unamuno, José Ortega y Gasset and Americo Castro. Latin America, for its part, has produced figures of the stature of Juan Montalvo, José Martí, José Vasconcelos, Pedro Henríquez Ureña, José Carlos Mariátegui, Octavio Paz and Roberto Fernández Retamar. In the Dominican Republic, as in almost all of Latin America, the essay emerged formally in the second half of the 19th century and gained notoriety in the 20th century. Its orientation has traditionally been historical, political, sociological and literary. It is difficult to establish the starting point of the Dominican essay, since before this genre reached a certain level of maturity in the country, there was a considerable group of writers who expressed their political, social and literary concerns through essay prose .

The revolutionary ideals of the independentists and the restorers, amply embellished, as well as the reasons and disbeliefs of the conservative Dominican intellectuals of the second half of the 19th century predominate in the journalistic writings of the most valuable representatives of the first wave of national essayists. The articles of Alejandro Angulo Guridi (1816-1884), particularly those published in the weeklies El Orden, La República, La Reforma and El Progreso and later collected in his work Temas políticos (1891), reflect the level of political disarray in Dominican society at the time. Although less profound than Guridi in the analysis of political themes, but more skillful than many of his contemporaries in the perception of local customs and social ills, Ulises Francisco Espaillat motivated many of his acolytes to cultivate journalistic prose.

The annexationist editorials in the newspaper La Razón, written by Manuel de Jesús Galván (1834-1910), were written in a fluid and pleasant style. Years later, they were complemented by his defense of Pedro Santana, published in the weeklies Oasis and Eco de la Opinión. Another important figure in this embryonic stage of national essay writing was Manuel de Jesús Peña y Reynoso, author of essays on the novel Enriquillo by Manuel de Jesús Galván and Fantasías indígena by José Joaquín Pérez. But the most notable Dominican literary essayist of the 19th century and the first two decades of the 20th century was Federico García Godoy, who began his critical work in 1882 in the newspaper El Porvenir, extending until the time of his death in 1924. His opinions were disseminated in important national and foreign magazines and newspapers and in his works Perfiles y alivios (1907), La hora que pasa (1910), Páginas efímeras (1912), El derrumbe (1916) and Americanismo literario (1918). José Ramón López (1866-1922), who originally clung to the gastronomic proposal that associates the triumph of the people with the type of food of its inhabitants, is among the first of a notable number of national intellectuals who, like Américo Lugo (The Dominican State before public law, 1916 and Dominican nationalism, 1923), Francisco Moscoso Puello (Letters to Evelina, 1941), Manuel Arturo Peña Batlle (The Island of the Turtle), Juan Isidro Jimenes Grullón (The Dominican Republic: a fiction, 1965), Joaquín Balaguer (The island upside down, 1983) and Juan Bosch (The pentagon, substitute for imperialism, 1963 and David, biography of a king, 1968), disputed the various ideological currents of the island's essay writing. Among them, Peña Batlle, Moscoso Puello and Balaguer, subordinated their production to the current known as Dominican pessimism, which was based on the conservative belief that the Dominican Republic was incapable of developing by itself. Others, on the other hand, such as Juan Isidro Jimenes Grullón and Juan Bosch, relied on sociological and historical discourse to review and rectify many of the approaches of their immediate predecessors.

Currently, Dominican essayists on historical and sociological topics are interested in defining the concept of nationality, racial conflicts, and the social function of local intellectuals. The essays by Manuel Núñez (The Decline of the Dominican Nation, 1990), Andrés L. Mateo (Myth and Culture in the Age of Trujillo, 1993), José Rafael Lantigua (The Conspiracy of Time, 1994), and Federico Henríquez Gratereaux (A Cyclone in a Bottle, 1996) are notable examples of this trend. Others, such as Miguel Guerrero (The Last Days of the Trujillo Era, 1995, The Wrath of the Tyrant, 1996 and Trujillo and the Heroes of June, 1996) and MuKien Adriana Sang (Ulises Heureaux: Biography of a Dictator, 1987, Buenaventura Báez, the Caudillo of the South, 1991, and An Unfinished Utopia: Espaillat and 19th Century Dominican Liberalism, 1997) have found in the historical past the ideal way to review many nebulous chapters of national history, especially those related to the role played by several of the Dominican dictators.

Since the beginning of the 20th century, the literary essay began to gain ground. Then, the voices of Pedro Henríquez Ureña (Critical Essays, 1905, Six Essays in Search of Our Expression, 1927 and Literary Currents in Hispanic America, 1946), Max Henríquez Ureña (Brief History of Modernism, 1964), Camila Henríquez Ureña (Literary Appreciation, 1964) and Antonio Fernández Spencer (Literary Essays, 1960) emerged, who assumed, for the first time in the history of Dominican letters, literary analysis and criticism with scientific objectivity. Except for Bruno Rosario Candelier (The Cultured and the Popular in Dominican Poetry, 1979, The Island Imagination, 1984 and Mythopoetic Creation, 1989), Diogenes Cespedes (Six Essays on Latin American Poetics, 1983, Studies on Literature, Politics, Language and Poetry in Santo Domingo in the 20th Century, 1985, Politics of the Theory of Language and Poetry in Latin America in the 20th Century, 1995), Jose Alcantara Almanzar (Studies of Dominican Poetry, 1979), Daisy Cocco De Filippis (Semiotic Studies of Dominican Poetry, 1984) and Manuel Matos Moquete (The Theoretical Discourse in Literature in Hispanic America, 1983 and In the Spiral of Times, 1998), Franklin Gutierrez (Enriquillo: X-ray of a Galvanian Hero, 1999), the most recent promotion of National literary essayists, including Manuel Mora Serrano, Miguel Ángel Fornerín, José Enrique García, etc., have carried out invaluable work in the national press as columnists, book reviewers and literary chroniclers.

History, as a literary genre, has had great exponents in the country, from the great founders of Dominican historiography such as José Gabriel García, Antonio del Monte y Tejada and Bernardo Pichardo, to the hegemony of the representatives of two antagonistic tendencies from the ideological point of view, such is the case of Roberto Cassá and Frank Moya Pons.

The topic of Rafael Trujillo is the one that arouses the most interest and curiosity, hence Vega is one of the most read for his documentary history, as well as those historians who deal with the topics of the Catholic Church and the Trujillo era. Important historians from the Trujillo era, in addition to these, are Emilio Cordero Michel, Jaime de Jesus Dominguez, Franklin Franco Pichardo, Juan Daniel Balcacer and Bernardo Vega.

The themes of the struggles for Dominican independence (1821–1865), American interventions, the colonial and pre-Columbian periods have been carefully addressed by various Dominican historians with different approaches and methods of analysis. The Dominican Social Composition of Professor Juan Bosch is an essential reference as a sociological starting point to analyze the social structure of the Dominican Republic from a historical point of view, as is the Dominican Political Sociology of Jimenes Grullón.

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• Caribbean literature
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• "Literature of the Dominican Republic". Dominica Online, an Open Access digital library. Archived from the original on 2008-05-11. Retrieved 2018-01-01.
• Literature and other materials from the Dominican Republic, in the text-searchable, Open Access Digital Library of the Caribbean
• Al Amor del Bohio, Tomo II by Ramón Emilio Jiménez in the Digital Library of the Caribbean
• Antología Poética de Domingo Moreno Jimenes by Manuel Mora Serrano in the Digital Library of the Caribbean
• Cachón by Miguel Angel Monclús in the Digital Library of the Caribbean
• Cartas a Evelina by Francisco Moscoso Puello in the Digital Library of the Caribbean
• Carnavá by Angel Hernández Acosta in the Digital Library of the Caribbean
• Bani, o Engracia y Antoñita by Francisco Gregorio Billini in the Digital Library of the Caribbean
• Cosas Añejas by Cesar Nicolás Penson in the Digital Library of the Caribbean
• Over by Rámon Marrero Aristy in the Digital Library of the Caribbean
• La Fantasma de Higüey by Francisco Javier Angulo Guridi in the Digital Library of the Caribbean
• Apuntes sobre la Poesía Popular y la Poesía Negra en las Antillas by Tomás Rafael Hernández Franco in the Digital Library of the Caribbean