Topics of Tierra Nuestra: Modernist criollismo according to Samuel Darío Maldonado

Abstract

The following article explores the novel Tierra Nuestra (1921) by Venezuelan writer Samuel Darío Maldonado (1870-1925). It is a narrative work that belongs to the “modernist criollismo” (Lasarte, 1993) from the first two decades of the 20^th century. For some reason, political or cultural, Samuel Darío Maldonado was left out of the national literary canon. However, his historical and literary archive has more than 5,000 documents; his poetic work is very extensive and varied. The research shows that from the category of literate (Rama, 1984) and intellectual (Ramos, 1989), Samuel Darío Maldonado, through the exercise of writing, recovers in the present the patriotic ideals of the past as a way of building the Venezuela of the future. Literate project that is based on the education of the people and politics as a citizen's right needed to live well. As a result, Tierra Nuestra becomes an encyclopedic text of its author's knowledge and a narrative that seeks the construction of the national through the power of writing.