Literature/Society, in future. The extremes of the emerging republic in novelistic essays of Lucio V. Mansilla.

Abstract

Better than a fragmentary prose writer without a novel (as Ricardo Rojas classified him when instituted Argentine literary history in 1922) Lucio V. Mansilla (1831-1913) would be a displaced and border writer who fostered a novel multiplier of his life, whose value was in the future. Among the heterogeneous production developed on the margins of martial profession in the first half of the 1860s as Secretary in the Guard of Rojas (Province of Buenos Aires), Mansilla writes an Essay on the novel in Democracy, published by deliveries in the prestigious Buenos Aires newspaper La Tribuna at the end of 1863, where seven years later will appear An excursion to the Ranqueles Indians. From a progressive historicism deferred from foundational romanticism, the essay questions the imagination of a plausible novel in the nascent Argentine democracy, which faces moral and aesthetic challenges on the society of practical individuals. Under Sarmiento's rhetorical resonances (grandiose scenes, narrative transitions, subject as a character, persuasive appeal to the reader, knowledge by montage) emerge cultural and personal tensions that will hatch in Ranqueles, when Mansilla corrects by the press the dichotomous determinism of Facundo. Exponent of the unsettled transition towards liberal organization of the nation in Latin American periphery, the consideration of novel in an emerging democracy states problems related to representation and autonomy, which allow us to trace the literature of the future in the 19th century.