Collective Anxieties, Reader Manipulation and the 1910 Passage of Halley's Comet in Ramón María Tenreiro's La agonía de Madrid

The aim of this article is to analyze some aspects of the novelette La agonía de Madrid o la cola del cometa, published in 1910 by the Galician writer Ramón María Tenreiro. My main purpose is to show how the political meaning and ultimate reading effect of the text stems from the coalescence of various strategies: on the textual side, a double genre adscription which blends the sentimental novel or folletín with science fiction, the manipulation of the implicit audience, and a metaliterary epilogue; on the paratextual side, a careful staging of the circumstances of publication, mainly the perverse use of the cover illustration and the deliberate choice of the date of release, marked by nothing less than the fear of the end of the world.