In his study, Prendes undertakes an analysis of the naturalist movement in Spanish America. The introduction sets the literary and socio-historical context for his study by briefly discussing other literary movements in nineteenth-century Spanish America and by commenting on the ways that politics and social thought influenced novelists. Prendes then reviews the extant criticism about naturalism, focusing on criticism published in Spanish, although the bibliography includes references to several critical works written in French and English. He aptly points out that Spanish American naturalist writers have begun to receive more critical attention in the past couple of decades, although he does not connect this to the fairly recent surge of interest in nineteenth-century Latin American literature in general
