Men on the market: Jose Marti and Jose Asuncion Silva in the worlds of commerce and literature

This dissertation argues that literary and economic discourses emerged in tandem at the turn of the nineteenth century in Spanish America, rather than as separate and opposing spheres, as we have tended to believe. Focusing on a virtually unknown corpus of "commercial" writings by Jose Marti (Cuba, 1853--1895) and Jose Asuncion Silva (Colombia, 1865--1896), I provide a new reading of the relationship between the letrado and the market on the periphery of global capitalism.;Chapter One examines Marti's appeals to a masculinized variant of "natural poetry" as a refuge from the perils of a feminized urban marketplace. At the same time, however, Marti wrote essays promoting the sale of raw materials on the international market as a matter of male civic duty, transforming "nature" into an aesthetic fountain of material wealth for the region, and creating a contradiction between the "simple" and "sincere" language of poetry, and the duplicity of advertising. Chapter Two examines a set of contradictions mobilized within Marti's political imaginary, in which male citizens were to oscillate, in different contexts, between civic virtue and self interest; or between "poetic" heroism, and "practical" economic production.;Unlike Marti, whose austere brand of republican masculinity led him to reject all forms of luxury, Jose Asuncion Silva's life was centered on the promotion of "useless" but prestigious European goods. Chapter Three reads a set of advertisements Silva wrote for his family's Bogota import business, showing how the aims of art and business converged upon luxury objects. In light of Silva's obsession with luxury consumption, Chapter Four reads his posthumously-published novel De sobremesa as a sophisticated, if highly delusional, literary treatise on the political economy of the era, centering on cycles of boom and bust, monetary crisis and national debt.