Fissures in romantic narratives and imagined communities: Mary (1867) by Jorge Isaacs (1837-1895) and Úrsula (1859) by Firmina Dos Reis (1825-1917)

Abstract

The present work is based on the concept of imagined communities of Benedict Anderson and his relationship with Romanticism, in the works María de Jorge Isaacs and Úrsula de Firmina dos Reis, in which narratives are constructed with subjectivities resistant to power in Foucauldian terms. The authories are then explored in Isaacs and dos Reis: authorial subjects in the imagined communities in what were the United States of Colombia and Brazil. Thus, the authors will display narrations with limited enunciation subjects or with the ability to focus on people of African descent. That is to say, we are faced with two places of speech: the white man and landowner in decline with Efraín, who, nevertheless, manages to tell the story of the manumisa slave Nay, as well as the third person narration that focuses on the slave Susana, both narratives, in any case, linked by the story about the African Diaspora.