In the newly-independent countries, the writer lived precariously and in isolation. Frequently, his only stimulus came from literary groups which were constituted with the deliberate intention of encouraging a national literature. Sometimes, these circles were political as well as literary; such was the Salón Literario which met in Buenos Aires in 1837, and the tertulias held in the home of the Cuban intellectual Domingo Delmonte in La Habana. Other groups met only to talk of literature or to listen to readings of poetry and prose. In Mexico, the Academia Letrán, founded in 1839, encouraged a school of Romantic poetry; in Colombia, the Mosaico group, started in the 1850s, did much to encourage prose writing and financed the publication of one important novel (Maria, by Jorge Isaacs); in 1842, a Sociedad Literaria was inaugurated in Chile; an Ateneo was founded in Montevideo in 1877, and in Peru the ‘bohemios’ gathered together in the Perez bookshop in Lima between 1846 and 1850. These and other literary circles were exceedingly important in the history of nineteenth-century Latin-American literature.

One of the most burning topics discussed in many of the literary groups during the first half of the nineteenth century was the topic of Romanticism. ‘Romanticism’ is, of course, a term that covers a complex of attitudes and involves political, social and philosophical questions as well as changes in sensibility and new literary forms. But in Latin America, Romanticism was identified above all with individual freedom and nationalism.