This dataset is a corpus of 256 Spanish American 19th century novels written by Argentine, Cuban, and Mexican authors or published in the respective countries between 1830 and 1910. To date, 234 of the novels are in the public domain. The corpus is described and used for genre analysis in the dissertation "Genre analysis and corpus design: 19th century Spanish American novels (1830-1910)" by Ulrike Henny-Krahmer. The corpus was prepared in the context of the junior research group "Computational Literary Genres Stylistics" (CLiGS), a project funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and realized at the University of Würzburg between 2015 and 2020.