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With the influx of American influence into Philippine soil, primarily on account of the Spanish American War and the ceding of the Philippines to America in 1898, writers began to use English as their medium of expression, since it became the medium of instruction in all schools and was the preferred tongue among the intellectual elite, who were challenged into adopting a foreign tongue with a measure of adeptness. Understandably, Philippine literature, from the opening of the twentieth century until the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941, was patterned after Anglo-American models, romantic readings of nineteenth-century vintage saturating the literary scene. English became the primary tool for communication, not only in education but also in literature.
The almost four centuries of foreign domination had made Filipinos proficient in several tongues. By learning English and Spanish, educated Filipinos came in contact with the humanistic and scientific works of the most advanced countries of the world. On the other hand, some scholars claim that the development of this Western cultural orientation resulted in the submergence of those Asian values which are the bases of a national culture in evolution. With American textbooks, instructors, and writers as models, Filipinos started to learn not only a new language but also a new way of life alien to their tradition. Thus began their Western education, or miseducation, the onset of colonial orientation or disorientation depending on how one looks at it.
Even before World War II, nationalism had seeped into the country's literature because of political movements which demanded that writers begin weaning themselves from American influence and shaping their own national identity or psyche, that they become more aware of social realities beyond subjects of a romantic flavor, such as moonlight and roses, the birds, the bees, the flowers, and the trees, that they stop flaunting their bleeding hearts - products of a febrile imagination, so antiromanticists claimed. This was triggered by the establishment of a commonwealth kind of government in 1935, the first step toward a semblance of self-rule, with the promise of independence in 1946.
Generally, part of the literary ferment that appeared before World War 11 as it affected Philippine shores was fostered by the dynamic tension in the history of literary evolution and the...