Jorge Isaacs’s María and the Space-Time of Global Capitalism

This essay examines Jorge Isaacs’s María (1867), arguably Spanish America’s most famous nineteenth-century novel, as a literary treatise on the spatial and temporal contradictions arising from the expansion of global markets, as experienced from within peripheral nodes in that system. More specifically, I examine the novel’s staging of the irreducible difficulties of properly managing the temporal and spatial relations that link remote locales such as the Cauca Valley in Colombia to imperial centers of accumulation such as London. In this manner, I argue that the novel, though written from a peripheral locale, offers a timely reflection on an expanding world-system centered in nineteenth-century England.