Rescate editorial. Nunca es tarde cuando la dicha es buena (1858) de Tomás Gutiérrez

Abstract

This editorial rescue presents and contextualizes, within Nineteenth-Century Argentine literature, the sentimental brief novel or “novelita”, entitled Nunca es tarde cuando la dicha es buena, originally published in Las Violetas. Ensayos Literarios in 1858, by the unknown author Tomás Gutiérrez. This novel, mentioned by Hebe Molina and Myron Lichtblau in their studies of Argentine literary history of the 19th century, has remained unknown since the last decades of the 19th century, until now, when it is rescued from a single copy found in the Argentine Academy of Letters. Its re-edition is framed within a study of the sentimental literature of the 1850s and 1880s and contributes to the understanding of this literature, apparently only passatist and innocent, as a key discourse in the construction of subjectivities, roles of gender, sexual behaviors and forms of intimacy in the decades after Rosismo and before the consolidation of the Nation State in 1880. The moral character, the intertextuality with Christian resonance and its condition, at the same time, of first literary commodity (Velázquez, 2017) converge in the formation of this hybridized cultural device full of rich social implications. Also, the question of love marriage vs. forced marriage appears, both here and in other sentimental novels of the time, shows some of the topics that, around the sentimental sociability of the time, had created generational, racial and social class controversies.