Silva and Vargas Valdés's Gothic flourished as a curiosity rather than as a constant in the Colombian literature of the late nineteenth century. At this time, what writers were more interested in producing and what was being read the most were different forms of poetry (mainly romantic and symbolist) and costumbristas narratives, most of them created in Bogotá, the so-called illustrated center of the nation. Writers such as José Eugenio Díaz Castro (1803–1865), María Josefa Acevedo de Gómez (1803–1861), Luis Segundo de Silvestre (1838–1887), Soledad Acosta de Samper (1833–1913), and Rafael Pombo (1833–1912) were originally from Bogotá and were enthroned as canonical national writers. This literary centralization was part of the construction of the imagined community of Colombia from Bogotá (which politically occurred in 1886, after the triumph of the centralist political party), a city that was bizarrely envisioned by lettered Colombians and a handful of other Latin American elites as a “South American Athens.” As Colombian philosopher Santiago Castro-Gómez asserts, it is in the nineteenth century that a symbolic framework of Colombia was established as follows:

All these elements were cultivated in the small, cold Bogotá, which since then began to direct the destiny of the country through public policies, but also through the creation of cultural frames of reference, asserting Bogotá and its cultural productions as the benchmark for the rest of Colombia—replicating north-south power dynamics. It was the intellectual elite that crafted the idea of Bogotá as “South American Athens” at the end of the nineteenth century. This group saw themselves as belonging to a cultured society far above other Latin American cities, members of a lettered city that should direct the nation's future.