Estudios de Teoría Literaria (Nov 2020)
Did Buenos Aires experienced a "newspaper-mania" towards the 1870s? Thoughts on newspapers for "Little girls", illustrated press and the expansion of Buenos Aires’ reading public
Abstract
In the inaugural editorial to the third epoch of the newspaper, Correo de las Niñas, the “editorial staff” denounced that around 1872 “a dangerous disease” that “the critics” called “with justice the newspaper-mania” infected Buenos Aires (III época, N° 1, 9 July 1876: 1). Did such “newspaper-mania” exist ten years before the date that the literature accepts as the beginning of the modern editorial market in the Argentina? Or is this diagnosis an exaggeration product of nineteenth-century’s hyperbolic penmanship? This article presents an approach to these questions, analyzing the panorama of weekly newspapers and lithography during the 1860s. In particular, the role of the aforementioned Correo de las Niñas. A publication, little studied so far, that combined a series of innovative editorial resources oriented to reading for entertainment and became, we argue, the first title oriented to the “beautiful sex” that achieved commercial success.
