1
Giaudrone notes: «Se trata de un grupo con relaciones interpersonales bastante más sólidas de lo que comúnmente se cree, cuyo intercambio de ideas se dio a través de la asistencia a centros culturales, la publicación en las numerosas revistas y periódicos que circulaban en la época y una importante relación epistolar». The most famous among this tightly knit group are: Rodó, Reyles, Viana, Quiroga, Herrera y Reissig, de las Carreras, Vaz Ferreira, Agustini, and Sánchez, n. 4, 285.
2
For an overview of the changes occurring in Spanish American during the end of the nineteenth century, see Glickman, Fin del siglo, 4-47.
3
See, for example, the article by Santiago Locascio published in Germen and quoted by Glickman in Fin del siglo, 331-332.
4
Russell H. Fitzgibbon indicates three historic or demographic factors that contribute to this situation: «effective Spanish colonization did not begin until the eighteenth century, by which time the religious fervor of the earlier generations and centuries had in considerable measure atrophied; during the colonial period Uruguay remained largely an ecclesiastical appendage of Buenos Aires, and its intensity of spiritual development and devotion was correspondingly diminished... In the second place, the revolutionary period was characterized by a large influx of foreigners, especially English and French, who were either non-Catholic or only nominally Catholic. Third, the large immigration beginning late in the nineteenth century, while it came in great part from Catholic countries, represented social and economic strata which were often of less than fervent attachment to the Church»
(231). Fitzgibbon goes on to explain that Batlle contributed to Uruguay’s distance from the Catholic Church, for early on he developed a skeptical attitude toward it and its beliefs (213-215).
5
For this discussion I am indebted to two chapters from the Cambridge History of Latin American Literature, the first «The Literary Historiography of Brazil» and the second «Brazilian Poetry from Modernismo to the 1990s» by Benedito Nunes and Giovanni Pontiero, respectively.