It was not until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the idea of literature as an independent category emerged, that it became possible to conceive of a Spanish American literature, one, moreover, worthy of a history. From the early Renaissance on, arts and letters were thought to be derived from the classics, the immanent and ideal model of all aesthetic expression, either as copy or corruption. The fundamental change that allowed for the possibility of a Spanish American literature was the gradual abandonment of the formalist abstraction of Neoclassicism, and the adoption of a psychological, empirical, and contingent concept of artistic creation. If the milieu, in all its concrete details, and the individual psychology of the creator are determining factors in artistic creation, then the work will reflect the conditions that define that individual and the particular nature that surrounds him and which he expresses. The issue of the difference of American nature could not be thought of in terms of its influence on the creation of literature until the emergence of what can be broadly termed the romantic spirit.

This does not mean, however, that some writers of the colonial Baroque did not write as if there were already an American literary tradition. Tradition is not synonymous with literary history. Tradition is the sum of works that a writer or group of writers conceive as antecedent, as origin, as the connection with a literary past from which they issue. Tradition is a binding, living, and dynamic past. Its existence may or may not be explicit, but it is necessarily and always implicit. Literary history, on the other hand, is the conscious and deliberate activity of recounting how certain works determine each other in time and among people who share a language and sometimes a geographic space.