In Colombia, as in other Latin American countries, the literary history opens with the chronicles of the conquest and the descriptions of life in the new colony. The best example is El carnero (1636) by J. Rodríguez Freile, a narration halfway between the historical document and the picaresque novel. Between the 18th and 19th centuries, the struggle for independence pushed literary production towards writings intended to support the new political and spiritual trends of the nation, such as the works of A. Nariño, CA Torres and FA Zea. The discussion of patriotic themes is often accompanied by the description of American life and landscape, as well as the assimilation of romantic modules.

In the 19th century. the work of poets such as JE Caro, G. Gutiérrez González and R. Pombo, without going beyond the limits of a local descriptivism, reflects the attempt to combine an innovative expressive rendering with the new and original themes provided by historical experience and reality American. Still similar to romantic ideals is the poetic and narrative production of J. Isaacs, a sensitive painter of an idyllic nature, not without a deep vein of melancholy.

According to listofusnewspapers, the overcoming of the romantic experience occurs with the renewal of poetic forms and literary language promoted by modernism, of which the poet JA Silva was one of the greatest exponents. Following the influence of the European avant-gardes, in the 1920s new research trends developed in a symbolist and postmodernist direction, evident in the collections Tergiversaciones de Leo Gris by L. de Greiff (1925) and El árbol que canta by E. Castillo (1928)), and later in the work Piedra y cieloby E. Carranza (1939). In fiction, starting from the end of the 19th century, the regionalist novel characterized by the painting of the popular world prevails, in works of costume that constitute one of the most fruitful strands of Colombian literature; is its maximum exponent, capable of overcoming the didacticism and moralism inherent in the genre, T. Carrasquilla. In the early 20th century. the narrative continues this orientation in the context of colombia costumbrismo, which can also be found, in part, in the work of JE Rivera, who, with his modernist realism, gave life with La vorágine (1924) to one of the fundamental novels of Spanish literature. American.

In the second half of the 20th century, poetry continues its journey of research by turning attention to human problems or characterized by the use of strong hints of denunciation and rebellion. In fiction, alongside a current that favors the tones of the realist novel, attentive to peasant and indigenous problems (M. Zapata Olivella, J. Botero Restrepo), the appearance of a type of novel that breaks the traditional structures approaching the formal experiments, the use of language and the unfolding of the imagination typical of so-called magical realism and the most recent trends in Spanish-American fiction. In this context, alongside the work of G. García Márquez, Nobel laureate in 1982, we note that of A. Cepeda Zamudio and R. Cárdenas.

In the situation of violence and chaos that characterizes the history of Colombia in the last years of the 20th century, poetry repeatedly assumes the task of a vital voice of hope and rebellion. Since the 1970s, small publishing houses and poetry magazines (Puesto de combate and Golpe de dados, both founded in 1973; and then Ulrika, which appeared in 1981, and Gradiva, 1987) have ensured the poets the opportunity to make themselves known outside the university circuits of origin. The panorama appears extremely varied and several generations of poets live side by side, integrating profitably. While poets such as E. Restrepo, E. Perry, JM Roca, D. Jaramillo, JG Cobo Borda reach full maturity, the poets of the group that arose in the 1960s around the magazine Mito (1955-62), such as F. Charry Lara, Á. Mutis and F. Arbeláez, those who in the years 1960-1970 had given birth to the avant-garde movement nadaísta (from nada”Nothing”), such as J. Jaramillo Escobar, and those who in the 1970s were defined as the generation of disenchantment, such as JM Arango and G. Quessep. Turned to the daily and intimate world of a painful old age is the production of M. Rivero. The lyrical retreat continues to coexist with a poem that resists physical and psychic ruin, as in M. Ordóñez and MM Carranza. However, there are those, like H. Alvarado Tenorio or H. Socarrás, who have abandoned the prophetic language of rebellion and rejection for an ironic poem, in which humor relativizes reality and places it back in its right boundaries. Also worth mentioning Á. Rodríguez, creator of intertextual games that involve poetry but also the world of cinema.

As far as fiction is concerned, the two most well-known writers by far are the ever-active García Márquez and Á. Mutis, as well as a poet, author of novels in which the introspective element reigns and in which the Gothic trait mixes with classical genres in a strongly poetic language. Alongside them, still active authors in the 1980s and 1990s are M. Mejía Vallejo and F. Vallejo, whose works focus on the theme of urban violence. The same theme also recurs in realist-style narrators such as A. Caicedo and L. Fayad, and above all G. Álvarez Gardeazábal; while absorbed in linguistic research and metal-literary reflection are two writers who have marked a decisive renewal in the Colombian panorama: G. Espinosa and RH Moreno-Durán, whose linguistic game, refined and ironic, he often travels through upsetting and transgressive areas of reality. Experiments between neo-baroque and intimism also characterize the writing of D. Ruiz Gómez. PA Mendoza is also known in Europe, more than for the novel Años de fugue (1979), set in the colorful world of Latin American revolutionaries exiled in Paris, for being a sort of biographer of his friend García Márquez, in texts in which the portrait of the famous writer is outlined against the background of the reflection on the role of Latin American intellectuals and on their political positions, in particular with respect to the Cuban question. M. Moreno and L. Restrepo are ironic, sensual narrators, attentive to the inner world even in its magical and dreamlike values.