Pablo y Virginia, criollos in the first Golden Age of Argentine edition

Abstract

Paul et Virginie’s remarkable success in XXth century Argentina is largely due to the melodramatic scenographies and exotic schemes elaborated in the XIXth century, when Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s idyllic novel became a global phenomenon. A subtle and progressive decontextualizing process blurred ideological references to the Lumières. In this article, I contend that some popular editions of Pablo y Virginia of the first golden age of Argentine publishing (1936-1955) reactivate reading programs contained in the formal structure of the 1788 text in order to understand the present. Two historical genres seem particularly relevant: utopian narration and pastoral idyll, now considered from the South.