When I wrote An Introduction to Spanish-American Literature in 1969, I had to beg and borrow books from friends and acquaintances. There was very little in translation and in Spanish departments in British universities, Latin America was either ignored or was a very minor option. During the last twenty-five years, the reading public and literary publication have undergone such an extraordinary expansion that it now seems inconceivable that one person should attempt to cover the whole field as I did in 1969. (Even then, of course, it was a rash undertaking.)

It is not only the sheer amount and quality of writing now being published but, in the last decade, literary scholarship has transformed both our knowledge of the literature of the past, including pre-Columbian literature, and has altered the old evolutionary paradigms of literary history. Scholarly editions of texts of the colonial period and the nineteenth century, the focus on genres such as autobiography which were formerly considered non-literary and new interpretations of standard texts have complicated and transformed our understanding of Latin-American culture.

This book owes much to the pioneers of Latin-American criticism – Pedro Henriquez Ureña, Alfonso Reyes and Anderson Imbert as well as to critics of my own generation, especially Angel Rama and this is reflected in its structure. Inevitably in the last years, however, my thinking has changed on many topics.