The nation formation and the blank in the argentine narrative: fiction and civilization in 19th century

Abstract

The tale El Matadero by Esteban Echeverría (1805-1851) is like a establisher report that make explicit the tensions deeply experienced at Argentina on the years of Juan Manuel de Rosas government. Exceeding the dichotomous limits between federalists and unitarists, El Matadero is a criticism on to Buenos Aires people who supported the caudillo Rosas and his authority. Actually, Echeverría frames a metaphor about the Argentinean political process in which we can see empty spaces in its “civilization” (it is like a civilizational vacuum) when he describes the townsmen and, at the same time, he shows us the paradoxes within for the reaching the project from liberals and illustrated porteños.