Abstract
This article addresses Enrique Gaspar’s novel El anacronópete (1887) by means of the articulation of the fantastic genre and nationalism. The nineteenth century witnessed a powerful scientific and technological development, which introduced economic, political and social changes. This can be traced in literature, especially in the second half of the century: for example, in the antagonistic positions between Emilio Ferrari and Gaspar Núñez de Arce in the field of poetry, or novels by Benito Pérez Galdós as Doña Perfecta (1876), in which the tension between the countryside and the city is compared to that existing between tradition and modernity. In this context, the value of Gaspar's novel surpasses the anecdote of presenting the first time machine in literature, eight years before Wells’s. Its value lies in the way in which, starting from the articulation of scientific and literary discourse, it expands the limits of the fantastic while using the procedure to address the question of national identity. The action takes place during the International Exhibition in Paris in 1878. The novel shows the popularity of the “famous Jules Verne” in Spain, whose “marvelous hypotheses” will be considered “children's toys in the face of the magnitude of the real invention of the modest Zaragoza neighbour of Spain”. More than a science fiction novel, the text calls for the incorporation of concepts related to the process of creation of national identities from such disciplines as history and sociology.References
Álvarez Junco, J. (2001). Mater Dolorosa. La idea de España en el siglo XIX. Madrid: Taurus.
Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of 4ationalism. Londres & Nueva York: Verso.
Andreu Miralles, X. (2016). El descubrimiento de España. Mito romántico e identidad nacional. Barcelona: Taurus.
Archilés, F. (2006). “Hacer región es hacer patria”. La región en el imaginario de la nación española de la Restauración. Ayer, 64, 121-147.
Archilés, F. & Martí, M. (1999). La construcción de la Nación española durante el siglo XIX: logros y límites de la asimilación en el caso valenciano. Ayer, 35, 171-190.
Archilés, F. & Martí, M. (2005). Una nació fracassada? La construcció de la identitat nacional espanyola al llarg del segle XIX. Recerques, 51, 141-163.
Beer, G. (2009). Darwin's Plots. Evolutionary 4arrative in Darwin, George Eliot and 4ineteenth-Century Fiction (3ª ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bhabha, H. (ed.) (1990). 4ation and 4arration. Nueva York: Routledge.
Botrel, J. (2007). Cosmopolitismo y mediación cultural en la España del siglo XIX. Península: Revista de Estudios Ibéricos, 4, 35-44.
Culler, J. (2003). Anderson and the Novel. En J. Culler & P. Cheah (eds.), Grounds of Comparison. Around the work of Benedict Anderson (pp. 29-52). Nueva York: Routledge.
García, A. M. (1993). Antecedentes literarios y estéticos del “naturalismo galdosiano”: La desheredada. En J. Bombín Quintana (coord.), Actas del Cuarto Congreso Internacional de estudios galdosianos (1990) (pp. 439-456). Las Palmas de Gran Canaria: Ediciones del Cabildo Insular de Gran Canaria.
Gaspar, E. (1884). El Anacronópete: zarzuela: viaje atrás verificado en el tiempo desde el último tercio del siglo XIX hasta el caos y dividido en tres jornadas y trece cuadros. [Manuscrito digitalizado]. Consultado el 11 de septiembre de 2017 en http://bdhrd.bne.es/viewer.vm?id=0000014484&page=1
Gaspar, E. (1887). El Anacronópete. Viaje a China. Metempsicosis. Barcelona: Daniel Cortezo y Cª.
Jusdanis, G. (2001). The 4ecessary 4ation. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Menéndez y Pelayo, M. (1882). Historia de los heterodoxos españoles, III. Madrid: Libreria Católica de San José.
Otis, L. (2002). Literature and Science in the 4ineteenth Century. An Anthology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pérez Galdós, B. (1878). Doña Perfecta. Madrid: Imprenta de la Guirnalda.
Pérez Galdós, B. (1888). Marianela. Madrid: Imprenta de la Guirnalda.
Pérez Garzón, J. (1999). El nacionalismo español en sus orígenes: factores de configuración. Ayer, 35, 53-86.
Riquer, B. de (1994). La débil nacionalización española del siglo XIX. Historia Social, 20, 97-114.
Santiáñez-Tió, N. (1995). De la luna a mecanópolis. Antología de la ciencia ficción española (1832-1913). Barcelona: Quaderns Crema.
Todorov, T. (1975). The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
License
- The Author hereby warrants that he/she is the owner of all the copyright and other intellectual property rights in the Work and that, within the scope of the present Agreement, the paper does not infringe the legal rights of another person.The owner of the copyright work also warrants that he/she is the sole and original creator thereof and that is not bound by any legal constraints in regard to the use or sale of the work.
- The Author grants the Purchaser non-exclusive and free of charge license to unlimited use worldwide over an unspecified period of time in the following areas of exploitation:
2.1. production of multiple copies of the Work produced according to the specific application of a given technology, including printing, reproduction of graphics through mechanical or electrical means (reprography) and digital technology;
2.2. marketing authorisation, loan or lease of the original or copies thereof;
2.3. public performance, public performance in the broadcast, video screening, media enhancements as well as broadcasting and rebroadcasting, made available to the public in such a way that members of the public may access the Work from a place and at a time individually chosen by them;
2.4. inclusion of the Work into a collective work (i.e. with a number of contributions);
2.5. inclusion of the Work in the electronic version to be offered on an electronic platform, or any other conceivable introduction of the Work in its electronic version to the Internet;
2.6. dissemination of electronic versions of the Work in its electronic version online, in a collective work or independently;
2.7. making the Work in the electronic version available to the public in such a way that members of the public may access the Work from a place and at a time individually chosen by them, in particular by making it accessible via the Internet, Intranet, Extranet;
2.8. making the Work available according to appropriate license pattern Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) as well as another language version of this license or any later version published by Creative Commons. - The Author grants the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan permission to:
3.1. reproduce a single copy (print or download) and royalty-free use and disposal of rights to compilations of the Work and these compilations.
3.2. send metadata files related to the Work, including to commercial and non-commercial journal-indexing databases. - The Author declares that, on the basis of the license granted in the present Agreement, the Purchaser is entitled and obliged to allow third parties to obtain further licenses (sublicenses) to the Work and to other materials, including derivatives thereof or compilations made based on or including the Work, whereas the provisions of such sub-licenses will be the same as with the attributed license pattern Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)or another language version of this license, or any later version of this license published by Creative Commons. Thereby, the Author entitles all interested parties to use the work, for non-commercial purposes only, under the following conditions:
4.1. acknowledgment of authorship, i.e. observing the obligation to provide, along with the distributed work, information about the author, title, source (link to the original Work, DOI) and of the license itself.
4.2. the derivatives of the Work are subject to the same conditions, i.e. they may be published only based on a licence which would be identical to the one granting access to the original Work. - The University of Adam Mickiewicz in Poznań is obliged to
5.1. make the Work available to the public in such a way that members of the public may access the Work from a place and at a time individually chosen by them, without any technological constraints;
5.2. appropriately inform members of the public to whom the Work is to be made available about sublicenses in such a way as to ensure that all parties are properly informed (appropriate informing messages).
Other provisions
- The University of Adam Mickiewicz in Poznań hereby preserves the copyright to the journal as a whole (layout/stylesheet, graphics, cover design, logo etc.)