Most texts in Galician that were published in the first half of the 19th century appeared either in the emerging periodic press or in pamphlets, as is the case of Proezas de Galicia (1810), Rogos de un escolar gallego (1813, with successive editions until 1840) and a number of the controversialist Diálogos and Tertulias typical of that period. These writings were disseminated mainly in oral form through their public reading before illiterate audiences.

In the course of the second half of the century, journals and newspapers kept playing a very important role, but editions in book format also appeared, often in instalments. In Vigo, Juan Compañel promoted key journals such as La oliva and El miño (1856-73) and printed Manuel Murguía’s Diccionario de escritores gallegos (1862) and Rosalía de Castro’s Cantares gallegos (1863). In Lugo, Manuel Soto Freire released several Almanaques and printed Murguía’s Historia de Galicia (vols I and II, 1865-66), Rosalía’s novel El caballero de las botas azules (1867) and Juan A. Saco Arce’s Gramática gallega (1868). Alejandro Chao, in Madrid and Havana, published the seminal journal La ilustración gallega y asturiana (1878-82), edited by Murguía, and created the publishing house La Propaganda Literaria, which published Rosalía’s Follas novas (1880). In A Coruña, A. Martínez Salazar launched the collection Biblioteca Gallega (1886-99), in which he published several of the most significant works of the Galicianist culture of the time, including Murguía’s Los precursores in 1886, Eduardo Pondal’s Queixumes dos pinos, Manuel Curros Enríquez’s Aires d’a miña terra (3rd ed.) and the three volumes of Antonio de la Iglesia’s El idioma gallego: Su antigüedad y vida; the two volumes of Augusto González Besada’s Historia crítica de la literatura gallega appeared in the following year. Two important newspapers were Galicia (A Coruña, 1860-65 and 1887-93) and El heraldo gallego (Ourense, 1874-80).

Anthologies played a major role in the dissemination of Galician literature. This trend began with the bilingual anthology Álbum de la Caridad (1862), followed by El idioma gallego, a collection wholly in Galician, including medieval texts. Uxío Carré Aldao published La literatura gallega en el siglo XIX (A Coruña, 1903) and Literatura gallega (Barcelona 1911).

In the status-raising of Galician – against the prevailing attitude which considered the Galician language a rustic, uneducated dialect – the recovery of the literary, legal and administrative documents of the 13th-15th century played a significant role. An early landmark was the appearance of the Cancionero de Baena (Madrid 1851); but the crucial event was the rediscovery of Galician-Portuguese troubadour lyric poetry, both secular and religious, in editions like Cancioneiro portuguez da Vatican, edited by Teófilo Braga (Lisbon 1878), Alfonso X (“El Sabio”)’s Cantigas de Santa Maria (Madrid 1889), and the monumental Cancioneiro da Ajuda by Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos (Halle 1904). Documentary material was edited by Antonio López Ferreiro (the Crónica de Santa María de Iria, 1888) and by Andrés Martínez Salazar (the Crónica troyana – a particularly prestigious achievement – 1900); other editions appeared in journals such as Galicia diplomática (1882-93) and Galicia histórica (1901-03) or collections such as Documentos gallegos de los siglos XIII al XVI (1911). The discovery of the “Vindel Parchment” in 1914, with text and music by the Galician minstrel Martín Codax, provided a Galician cultural consciousness with a major asset, while philologists with Portuguese sympathies tended to “nationalize” it as Portuguese. The dissemination of medieval literature served to highlight both the common origin of Galician and Portuguese and the lower sociolinguistic status of the former in relation to the latter. This, on the one hand, reinforced the demand for the social normalization of the Galician language (to achieve equality with the normative status of its neighbour south of the River Miño) and, on the other hand, resulted in proposals to bring the Galician language closer to, or even identify it with, Portuguese.

In any event, Galician appeared in print almost exclusively in literary writings or historical documents, and hardly ever in other types of text, with exceptions such as the didactic Resume da historia de Galicia (1898). Moreover, there were no normative standards for written Galician, which as a result presented a confusing and changeable appearance. This hindered rather than helped the propagation of the language and its use in domains other than literature at a time of expanding literacy skills and increasing print circulation.