Ficción adulterada: pasiones ilícitas del entresiglo venezolano

Ficción adulterada examines narratives of adultery from late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Venezuelan cultural productions that reveal the contradictions and complexities of constructing a national culture in an emergent nation. I argue that these narratives inscribed emergent models of politics, aesthetics, and collective fantasies around the idea of adultery and/or adulteration. Here, my understanding of adultery is broad, and corresponds with its perception during the period: not only is it any voluntary, extramarital, sexual, or affective relationship that, when discovered or suspected by the spouse, can place the marriage at risk and erode the respectability associated with normative sexuality, it is also the idea of adulteration, mixing, or contamination. Adultery thus understood constitutes a productive approach to the fictional corpus and relevance of the literary institution, but also and principally to a group of ideas and problems that reveal local anxieties.