The study of artistic production in nineteenth-century Latin America remains in a disconcertingly incomplete state. To take the case of literature, for example, on which there is a vast, if widely scattered bibliography, many of the most elementary tasks remain to be completed. With the exception of Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Mexico and Peru, histories of Latin America’s national literatures are incomplete, and the inter-relation of national and continental patterns has not been satisfactorily established. Paradoxically, the extraordinary expansion of interest in contemporary Latin America and its culture during the past two decades, when Latin American artists in a wide range of fields have come to international attention, threatens to obscure or even obliterate all that has gone before. Few scholars, since the mid-1960s, have set out to become specialists on colonial or nineteenth-century literature and culture. The historian of the nineteenth century must for the most part rely on many of the same textual and critical materials that would have been used a quarter of a century ago, albeit with a number of invaluable additions, above all in the bibliographical field.

Of general works on cultural history, Pedro Henríquez Urena, Historia de la cultura en la América hispánica (Mexico, D.F., 1947); Eng. trans., with a supplementary chapter by G. Chase, A Concise History of Spanish American Culture (New York, 1947), although little more than an annotated checklist, remains perhaps the most useful. More exuberant, less balanced but also invaluable, is G. Arciniegas, El continente de siete colores (Buenos Aires, 1965); Eng. trans., Latin America: A Cultural History (New York, 1966).