Andrés Bello: The Uses of Literature and History in the Independence Period.

• In Event: History and Fiction in Latin America: A Creative Relationship?

Abstract

Andrés Bello was an early exponent of the connections between history and literature in Spanish America. As a young bureaucrat in the Capitanía General of Caracas, Bello versified on important events, such as the introduction of smallpox vaccination by Charles IV (Oda a la vacuna, 1804). Once in London, as representative of the Caracas Junta, Bello researched one of the earliest poems in the Spanish language, the Poem of the Cid, which allowed him to establish the then virtually unknown source as the foundation of Hispanic literature, for reasons that will become clearer in the context of the formation of new nations. As the events of independence unfolded, he versified what appeared to be a victorious path to emancipation, in ways that brought him much fame, but also dangerously close to opposition to the rising star of Simón Bolívar. However fond of belles-lettres, Bello moved increasing to reflection into the methods of history, leading the process of professionalization of the discipline at the University of Chile. He provides a significant example of the close connection between literature and history in the formation of new nation states in Spanish America.

Author

• Ivan A Jaksic, Stanford University