Travel, films and translation are just beginning to make Spanish America and its writers familiar outside the continent. The spectacle of the landscape, the faces of the peoples are no longer strange; a few names–those of the poets Neruda and Vallejo, for instance–are widely known. And yet outside the bright circle of the familiar, there are deep shadows of ignorance. We still understand all too little about the past of Spanish America. Its history, social structure and literature are not yet so intimate a part of people's general knowledge that we can take them for granted. That is why this Introduction to Spanish–American Literature must embrace so much more than creative writing. No doubt it would be superfluous to introduce the flat landscape of Holland into an account of Dutch literature, but we can hardly keep the pampa, mountains and jungles out of a book on Spanish–American literature. Nor can historical events, such as Independence or the Mexican Revolution, be regarded simply as ‘background’. History, geography, sociology are just as much a part of the study of this literature as poetic technique or novelistic structure.

There are nineteen Spanish-speaking countries in America. Most of them gained their independence from Spain and were proclaimed republics in the 1820s. Since that date, their history has taken separate paths and each country has developed its own literature, often as a conscious national project.