Crédito, propiedad y narración en la novela tropical de Zeno Gandía
The article upholds that El negocio (1920), the third novel by Puerto Rican naturalist author Manuel Zeno Gandía, was less well-received by critics and readers than his earlier work, La charca (1894), in part because of its focus on the Island’s commercial circuits and geographical displacements throughout the Atlantic during the last years of Spanish colonial domination. The centrality of credit, finance, and property relations, reveals an anxiety (as well as ambivalence) on the part of the author toward the incorporation of the Island into colonial modernity. These anxieties and ambivalences are also recognizable in Zeno Gandía’s deployment of realist techniques of representation. More so than his earlier work, El negocio links representation to a distinctive articulation of relationships between political economy, democracy, colonialism, and truth, thereby providing a different dimension to the realism that is characteristic of the author.
