Crime and Criminals in 19th-Century Spanish America

3 units

The definition of deviant conduct was a mainstay of the discourse of nation building in Latin America. The idea of progress was never conceived without first taking for granted a specific idea of order that referred not only to the public space but also to the newly independent citizens' private lives. In this course, we will study -- through the readings of legal, medical, and literary texts of the time -- how criminal conduct was represented in literature and newspapers. We will focus on the impact the definition of the criminal subject had on the social, political, economic, and cultural arenas. In particular, we will concentrate on the roles of lawbreakers and their actions in 19th-century novels. Some of the authors studied will be Juan Montalvo, Eduardo Blanco, Manuel Payno, José Martí, and Federico Gamboa.