Historiography of Latin American and Caribbean Literature: from Positivism to Marxism and Cultural Positivism

Abstract

Latin American and Caribbean literary history has had to face the theoretical problems inherited from European literary history: positivism, literary periods, literary generations, objects of study, and many others. In the last three decades of the twentieth century, works have appeared which from a theoretical and critical, as well as an applied, literary perspective have questioned the validity of the discipline as it had been practiced up until that moment. The proposals offered are basically two. On the one hand, a renewal of literary history accounting both for the variety of existing literatures in this cultural domain and for the radically social historical basis of these literatures; on the other hand, a renewal of literary historiography, resorting to elements coming from comparative literature. These elements,, in the opinion of many authors, are the ones which may account for a variety which has to be considered as, not so much literature in its learned and traditional sense, but rather as the huge plurality of literary cultures which coexist in these countries.