Morir ¿de amor? Enfermedad y muerte en cuatro novelas de Soledad Acosta de Samper (1833-1913)

Abstract

Between 1864 and 1906, Soledad Acosta de Samper (1833-1913) published about 20 novels and almost 50 short stories in the most important newspapers and magazines in Colombia. To approach this extensive and versatile corpus, I have decided to study the romantic and realistic elements of some of these novels by analyzing how love, illness and death are related. These three elements, present in the four works that I will analyze, account for the changes in the literary and social concerns of the author. In this paper, I will try to demonstrate that in Dolores (1867) and Teresa la limeña (1868), the idealized concept of death and its link to exacerbated feelings are a manifestation of the romantic features in these works, while in Doña Jerónima (1878-1879) and El talisman de Enrique (1879), the relationship between hygiene, illness and death, due to a change in the codes of verisimilitude, move away from romanticism and make an approach to realism.