History Lessons: Refiguring the Nineteenth-Century Historical Novel in Spanish America
Lee Joan Skinner

History Lessons argues that the historical novel was a significant force in the construction of national and patriotic discourses in the nineteenth century. Nineteenth-century Spanish American authors took up the genre of the historical novel in order to explore the pressing questions of national and cultural identity that became increasingly urgent after the Wars of Independence (1810-1824). By grounding their definitions of identity in history, they were able to lay claim to a certain discursive authority. On the other hand, the historical novelists had to contend with the prevailing belief among Spanish American intellectuals that their own existence as Spanish Americans had arisen from the break with the past symbolized by the violent rebellion against Spanish rule.
    In short, the ideological project of the genre—the desire to establish the connections between past and present—comes into conflict with its Spanish American context, in which the past is violently severed from the present. History Lessons argues that the conflict between the differing conceptualizations of history, far from paralyzing Spanish American historical novelists, instead served as a generating mechanism for the texts.
    The historical novel was an enormously popular genre in nineteenth-century Spanish America despite—or perhaps because of—the conceptual problems it presented to writers. Little studied except in recent years, the genre is now receiving some of the critical attention its role in shaping the way that Spanish American intellectuals conceived of their cultural and national identities merits.
    Through detailed close readings of historical novels by by Mexican authors (Eligio Ancona and Vicente Riva Palacio), a Guatemalan (Jose Milla), an Argentine (Vicente Fidel López), a Chilean (Alberto Blest Gana), a Bolivian (Nataniel Aguirre), and a Colombian (Soledad Acosta de Samper), History Lessons analyzes the way that selected texts articulated such complex contradictions in order to provide textual constructions of national and civic identity.

isbn: 978-1-58871-093-2 (PB) 224 pp., $22.95