SOURCE: Ramos-Gascón, Antonio. “Spanish Literature as a Historiographic Invention: The Case of the Generation of 1898.” In The Crisis of Institutionalized Literature in Spain, edited by Wlad Godzich and Nicholas Spadaccini, pp. 167-93. Minneapolis: The Prisma Institute, 1988.

In the following essay, Ramos-Gascón contends that “the myth of the Generation of '98 has done nothing but cloud our understanding of the aesthetic and intellectual development of the end of the last century and the beginning of the present one” and argues that the literary movement should be viewed within the scope of Spanish literature.

In his 1968 essay “Second Thoughts on Currents and Periods,” Claudio Guillén wrote: “To explore the idea of what constitutes ‘literary history’ could very well be the most important theoretical challenge that the student of literature faces today.” Almost at the same time, Américo Castro published his work Los españoles: cómo...