Spanish American Literature Compared with That of the United States

Abstract

T HE three most important literatures of this Western Hemisphere are the Brazilian, the Spanish American and the Anglo-American. This essay, as the title indicates, will have to do with only two of these, the literature that has been produced in that part of the New World that was colonized by Spain and the literature that received its language and cultural traditions from England. In spite of many differences due to varying racial psychology, cultural inheritance, and social and political conditions, there is a notable similarity in the main trends of all the literatures of the New World. A general survey of Spanish American Literature has almost the same main divisions or periods as a literary history of the United States: the Colonial Period is followed by the Revolutionary; Neoclassicism makes way for Romanticism; Realism lays the foundation for Contemporary Literature. Within these larger divisions there will be noted many differences in detail, differences that are more interesting and more significant than the general similarities. The similarity of the main trends, it should be said in passing, is not the result of direct influence of either literature upon the other. The points of contact have been so few and so small that, until the last two or three decades, direct literary relations may be said to have been non-existent. Similar conditions and similar European influences account for the resemblance in general tendencies. More significant than the literary actions and reactions that grew out of the close cultural relations of the New World with the Old is the longrange tendency of all the American literatures toward national independence. In the beginning, and for many generations, the literature produced in the English and Spanish colonies was merely an extension of the literature of the mother country. In the Spanish colonies cultural traditions were stronger and more tenacious than in the English colonies because of closer political relations with Spain and a social organization that differed little from that of the mother country. These retarding influences, and the fact -that the colonial regime lasted twice as long as in this country, explain the comparative slowness of the movement toward literary independence in Spanish America during the first three centuries. Yet there, as here,