SPANISH-AMERICAN LITERATURE BY ISAAC GOLDBERG, Ph.D. WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY PROF. J. D. M. FORD NEW YORK BRENTANO'S PUBLISHERS INTRODUCTION It is only the other day that cultured men in the Spanish motherland began to manifest any real interest in the literature of their one-time colonies in the Western World. Hardly at all before Juan Valera, the charming novelist and discerning critic, wrote his gossipy American Letters, (1888-1890) did well trained men and much less, of course, the ordinary reader in the Iberian peninsula realize the ambitious activity of the many writers of the 19th century, scattered throughout the countries lying between the southern bounds of the United States and Tierra del Fuego; and not until Menéndez y Pelayo prepared for the Spanish Academy his Anthology of Spanish-American Poets (1893-95) was there any considerable knowledge in Spain of the great output of Spanish verse in the New World from the period of settlement down to our own times. Genial spirit though he was, Valera was unable to avoid a certain display of that condescending tolerance of the European critic for the products of the colonial mind which we in the United States have been so accustomed to find in the attitude of the British critics and essayists toward our own belles lettres. Still, Valera and Menéndez y Pelayo did prompt their Spanish compatriots to look with some degree of attention at the range of Spanish-American authorship, and then came the Modernist movement, which, emanating from the once ignored field of colonial letters, |