Dominican Republic literature refers to literary works by writers of Dominican ancestry written in or outside of the Dominican Republic, including those works produced both before and after final Dominican independence in 1865. Dominican authors have cultivated all the various literary forms, reflecting in their work the mixture of Spanish, African and Taíno elements that occurs in the Caribbean, and the influence of successive political and economic emigrations.
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, and Carrión Grimes belonged, among others. Since then, poetry, novels, short stories, essays and history writing have all expressed the multiple currents of thought that permeate the political, social and economic discourse of the country, especially European and American initially, and from the Far East in the late twentieth century.
The literature of the Dominican Republic continues to be in flux, and in search of greater projection both within and outside the national territory. As part of this, the Corripio Foundation and the State Secretariat for Culture award the National Literature Prize every year.
Dominican poetry Poetry has had prominent exponents in the Dominican Republic. The 19th century was a robust time for the genre, although the 20th century was even more prolific and saw Dominican poetry mature with the emergence of modernism via the avant-garde movements.
During the colonial period, Cristóbal de Llerena wrote the interlude Octava de Corpus Christi and Leonor de Ovando wrote sonnets. However, the outstanding triumvirate of 19th century Dominican poetry consisted of Salomé Ureña, José Joaquín Pérez, and Gastón Fernando Deligne, the three pillars on which the poetry of that period rested in all of its patriotic, indigenist and psychological aspects. Following them were Manuel María Valencia, the first romantic poet, through to Fabio Fiallo and others who assimilated the influences of European literary currents, and on to the incipient modernism embodied in the three important figures of Valentín Giró, Ricardo Pérez Alfonseca, and Osvaldo Bazil.
But it was not until the emergence of the avant-garde movements in the 20th century that Dominican poetry actually reached the category of the modern. Influenced by French symbolism, Otilio Vigil Díazo introduced the avant-garde in Dominican literature and was a great renovator of national lyric poetry. He founded the first poetic movement of a unipersonal nature and was joined by Zacarías Espinal, calling the movement Vedrinismo because in his verses he tried to do the pirouettes that the French aviator Jules Vedrines did in the air. Vigil Díaz introduced modernism in the form of free verse and prose poems with his books Góndolas (1912) and Galeras de Pafos (1921).
After Vedrines, Dominican poetry experienced another great moment when the trio of Domingo Moreno Jimenes, the philosopher Andrés Avelino, and the poet Rafael Augusto Zorrilla together founded Posthumism (sic) around 1921. They wrote a manifesto that added a poetry of a nationalist character to the avant-garde, rescuing the local color, the landscape, and the identity of the Dominican man. With this school, the Dominican poetic tradition was renewed by incubating new voices that strengthened it, although Darío's influence diminished with the appearance of Posthumism.
The Posthumism movement was followed by the Surprised Poetry movement, made up of Franklin Mieses Burgos, Mariano Lebrón Saviñón, Antonio Fernández Spencer, Aída Cartagena Portalatín, Freddy Gatón Arce, among others. Contrary to posthumism, this group of poets displayed a great aesthetic openness and had as their motto "poetry with the universal man". 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 them 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 emerged from the sixties generation 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 that shook the literary establishment of the time, which was typified by post-World War Two disenchantment, and laid the foundations for a break with the earlier generation. These poets ignored the ideological and historical circumstances of the country, creating a poetry of thought and reflection on other topics such as philosophy, death, and the erotic. Among these poets were Leandro Morales, José Mármol, Plinio Chahín, Dionisio de Jesús, Médar Serrata, Víctor Bidó, and José Alejandro Peña, among others. This movement led to the formation of groups such as the César Vallejo Literary Workshop, which included 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. This period also saw the emergence of the poets of Y Punto, made up mainly of publicists, painters and poets, and of 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.
Contrasts arose between the more established poets and independent voices such as Sally Rodríguez and Martha Rivera-Garrido, leading to the identification of Feminine Poetry, the Poetry of the Crisis, and the Poetry of Thought. The Circle of Women Poets of the Dominican Republic was born, made up of Chiqui Vicioso and Carmen Imbert Brugal, among others. The distances and differences within and between these groups varied, with migration playing an important role as many poets dispersed and settled in Puerto Rico, Germany, and the United States, weakening some claques and closing others permanently. The second Circle of Women Poets of the Dominican Republic emerged, including poets such as Ángela Pena, Aurora Arias, and Marianela Medrano.
José Enrique García and Cayo Claudio Espinal were notable transitional poets from the late 1970s and early 1980s, with the poets of the 1990s including Medar Serrata, Ramon Saba, and Cesar Sanchez Beras. Other transitional poets included José Enrique García, author of the book El Fabulador, and Cayo Claudio Espinal, creator of the Contextualist Movement and author of Utopía de los Relaciones, Banquetes de Aflicción, Comedio (Entre Gravedad y Rsa), Las Políticas Culturales en la República Dominicana, La Mampara and Clave de Estambre. Also transitional, Preeminencia del Tiempo appeared in 1993, characterized by an aesthetic and stylistic syncretism that integrated the classical canon with the various avant-garde schools.
Novels
Unlike poetry, the novel developed late in the Dominican Republic, eventually emerging under the influence of the French romanticism of Victor Hugo. This resulted in the Dominican novel not having the same strength as Dominican poetry, essays, and short stories until the 21st century, despite the great indigenist novel Enriquillo (1879) by Manuel de Jesús Galván.
Candidates for the first novel written by a Dominican include El Montero by Pedro Francisco Bonó, published in Paris in 1856, and Los Amores de los Indios by Alejandro Angulo Guridi, published in Havana, Cuba in 1843. Cecilia, also by Alejandro Guridi, was published incomplete in 1853 in the Dominican Sunday weekly El Progreso (numbers 1–3 and 5–8), and had come out even earlier in the Cuban newspaper El Eco de Villaclara in 1851.Miguel Collado. «¿Cuál es la primera novela publicada por un dominicano?» These early novels were followed by La Fantasma de Higüey by Francisco Angulo Guridi, Alejandro's brother, published in 1857 in Havana. The first Dominican novel printed in the Dominican Republic was La Campana del Higo: Dominican Tradition, which was published by the García Hermanos press in 1866.
Since then, Dominican novels have been classified into three major periods corresponding to those novels written before 1930, those written from 1930 to 1960, and those written after 1960, with this classification relating to historical events in the nation rather than to firm literary movements. As such, it is possible to highlight three important thematic trends in the evolution of the Dominican novel: the sugarcane novel, the biblical novel, and the costumbrista novel, represented by Cañas y Bueyes by Francisco Moscoso Puello, Over by Ramón Marrero Aristy, and Ginger by Andrés Pérez Cabral respectively. Biblical novels also include works by Carlos Esteban Deive, Marcio Veloz Maggiolo, and Ramón Emilio Reyes and costumbrist novels include The Cacica by Rafael Damirón, Baní or Engracia and Antoñica by Francisco Gregorio Billini, The Crafty by Juan Bosch, and the trilogy of Rufinito, Guanuma and Alma Dominicana by Héctor García Godoy. The propagandistic novel The Enemies of the Earth also merits inclusion.
In the 1960s, the Dominican novelists with the greatest international projection and acclaim were Marcio Veloz Maggiolo, author of a dozen novels as well as short stories and historical-archaeological essays and theater; Aída Cartagena Portalatín, who together with Maggiolo, founded the experimental novel; Veloz Maggiolo with Los Angeles de Hueso (1967); and Aída with Escalera Para Electra (1970). Other novels worthy of mention from 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. A great milestone in Dominican novels was when Only Ashes You Will Find by Pedro Vergés won the Blasco Ibáñez Prize and the Critics' Prize in Spain in 1980.
In the 1980s, a number of novelists stood 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, and Luis Martín Gómez, among others. Avelino Stanley in particular has a vast body of narrative work, among which Cathedral of Libido, Dead Time, and The Shots stand out. The journalist and narrator Emilia Pereyra has written The Green Crime, Ashes of Wanting, Cocktail with Frenzy, The Cry of the Drum, and the short story collection The Inescapeable 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. It won the 2020 National Novel Prize awarded by the Ministry of Culture of the Dominican Republic, and critics have described it as a "great novel of emigration."
Short stories