Literature and politics in the writing of Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera during the consolidation of the Porfiriato

Abstract

In this article I analyze a number of chronicles by modernist authorManuel Gutiérrez Nájera (1859-1895) as a highly ideologized discursive spacein which literature and politics are articulated. I want to prove that GutiérrezNájera’s journalistic work is still linked to a romantic political function, prior tothe autonomy of writing, in which the writer puts his pen to the service of formingcitizens. In this case, the modernist chronicle (which function and form isvery close to the romantic essay) serves as a disciplinary device, no longer legitimatedby the process of nation construction, but authorized by the process ofend-of-century modernization and the consolidation of the State, thereby continuingthe eDort of forming citizenships according to the modernizing projectof the Mexico of that era.