Fascinación y desengaño: Emma de la Barra ante el público

• Main Author: Maria Vicens
• Format: Article
• Language: Spanish
• Published: Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata 2019-07-01
• Series: Estudios de Teoría Literaria
• Subjects: Literatura argentina; escritoras; melodrama; mercado editorial; público lector
• Online Access: http://fh.mdp.edu.ar/revistas/index.php/etl/article/view/2718

The first two novels of Emma de la Barra, Stella (1905) and Mecha Iturbe (1906), mark the promising debut of the novelist and the rapid decline of her career, despite the great expectations that both the public readership and the local press had set on her figure as a woman writer. The greater narrative complexity and the development of a socio-political program linked to the rights of the working class and the role that the elite should have in that process arise at this point as the two key elements to think, not only the misunderstanding between the author and the readers in her second work, but also the place that women writers occupied in the Argentine cultural field of the early twentieth century, their possibilities to develop a professional career and intervene in the emerging cultural goods market, as well as the limitations they faced at the time to try certain literary genders and topics and the diverse ways they found to negotiate with these obstacles redirecting, in cases like De la Barra's, their authorial figures and literary ambitions.