SOURCE: "From Sentimentalism to Romanticism: Rereading María" in The Latin American Literary Review, Vol. XXII, No. 43, January-June, 1994, pp. 5-18.

In the following essay, Rosenberg discusses the narrative structure of Isaacs's María.

Jorge Isaacs's María is frequently found in the same category as Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac: it is a novel to be read by the young and naive not yet disillusioned by the skepticism of experience. The fainting spells and tears in the tale of tragic and innocent love move the young reader after the model of Paolo and Francesca, all the while irritating cynics by evoking a past that in their maturity they are forced to admit never existed. As Sylvia Molloy notes, the traditional reading of Isaacs's text is that of "una novela lacrimógena en la cual se pretende reviviry compartir con el lector, la pérdida de un primer amor" (36). Nonhispanists...