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AP Spanish Literature — Authors and Works flashcards

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Author, period, genre, themes and devices for works on the AP Spanish Literature reading list and other widely studied texts, from medieval ballads to the Boom, plus the movements and terms needed to discuss them.

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Learn deck · part of AP Spanish Literature and Culture · written against: College Board AP Spanish Literature and Culture Course and Exam Description, effective fall 2023 (38 required texts, eight units). Updated 2026-10-10.

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  1. What verse form do the medieval romances (ballads) use, and how did they survive?
    The romance: an indefinite series of octosyllabic lines with assonant rhyme in the even lines only. They were sung and passed on orally before being printed in the sixteenth-century romanceros.
    Medieval Period
  2. In the anonymous Romance de la pérdida de Alhama, whose point of view do we follow, and what event is behind it?
    The Moorish king of Granada, who learns that the Christians have taken the town of Alhama (1482), a blow that foreshadows the fall of Granada in 1492. It is a romance fronterizo (frontier ballad).
    Medieval Period
  3. What are the key facts about Lazarillo de Tormes: date, authorship and genre?
    Published in 1554, anonymous, and the founding work of the novela picaresca. The anonymity is often linked to its sharp anticlerical satire; the Inquisition banned it in 1559.
    Sixteenth Century
  4. What does the term Siglo de Oro cover?
    Spain's literary Golden Age, roughly the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: the Renaissance (Garcilaso, Lazarillo) followed by the Baroque (Cervantes, Góngora, Quevedo, Tirso, Sor Juana).
    Seventeenth Century
  5. Which traits define romanticism in Hispanic literature?
    Emotion over reason, the rebellious individual, longing for freedom, nature as a mirror of feelings, the exotic and the past. In Spain it peaked in the 1830s and 1840s.
    Romanticism Realism and Naturalism
  6. What is the central argument of José Martí's essay Nuestra América (1891)?
    Latin American nations must govern themselves from knowledge of their own reality and peoples — Indigenous, Black and rural — instead of copying European or US models, and must unite against the threat of the powerful neighbor to the north.
    Modernismo and the Generation of 98
  7. What is the central conflict in Lorca's La casa de Bernarda Alba (1936)?
    After her husband's death, Bernarda imposes eight years of mourning and confinement on her five daughters. Desire for Pepe el Romano, engaged to the eldest, Angustias, but secretly meeting the youngest, Adela, explodes against Bernarda's obsession with honor and appearances, ending in Adela's suicide.
    Twentieth-Century Poetry and Theater
  8. What was the Latin American Boom?
    The 1960s–70s international explosion of Latin American novels — García Márquez, Cortázar, Vargas Llosa, Fuentes — marked by experimental structure, shifting time and narrators, and global readership. Borges and Rulfo are its key precursors.
    The Boom and Its Contemporaries
  9. In Rosario Ferré's La muñeca menor, what does the aunt's untreated wound reveal, and what does the doll come to mean?
    The doctor kept the aunt's river-prawn (chágara) bite from healing for years to keep collecting fees, paying for his son's studies. The son marries the youngest niece and exploits her and her doll: the story attacks a declining planter class, a greedy new bourgeoisie and the treatment of women as objects. Not in the AP Spanish Literature and Culture 2026 outline; background only.
    Contemporary Voices
  10. What is the structure of a classical Spanish soneto?
    Fourteen endecasílabos in two cuartetos and two tercetos, usually with consonant rhyme (ABBA ABBA plus varied tercets). Garcilaso, Góngora and Quevedo all use it.
    Literary Terms and Devices

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About these cards

Review status: Second-reader reviewed, with corrections applied.

Checked against:

  • Period order and the reading list follow the College Board AP Spanish Literature and Culture Course and Exam Description (effective Fall 2023), used as an outline only (no text copied).
  • Pre-1900 texts checked against public-domain editions on Project Gutenberg and Internet Archive scans of named editions, the Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes author portals (cervantesvirtual.com) and the Liter·Alia annotated anthology (Universitetet i Oslo); literary terms checked against the Real Academia Española, Diccionario de la lengua española (reference only; no text copied). Modern works are summarized, not quoted.

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