JOSÉ MARÍA SAMPER / SOLEDAD ACOSTA DE SAMPER
The private diaries record aspects of everyday life, woven together by the affective life, in an attempt to capture and contain them in words, and to retain them through writing. They originated as texts for exclusive personal use, but by subsequent developments, they have come to take another course and have been published posthumously, achieving completely different goals from those that initiated them. Such is the case of the two texts that are the subject of this edition: the diaries of Soledad Acosta Kemble and José Maria Samper Agudelo, written during four months and four days, before their authors got married in 1855. The publication of these writings creates a bridge to the past and provides information about the writers that is personal, direct, first-hand, without distortions and historical, which makes it essential to understand who these intellectuals were.It is a great fortune that those fleeting and forgotten fragments of life have been preserved and have come to light again; a finding that allows the present to penetrate into the depths of the past and history, in order to obtain a better structured view of the circumstances in which they lived during that era. Soledad Acosta de Samper and José María Samper Agudelo became the only intellectual and public couple that dominated the Colombian cultural landscape and influenced directly and indirectly various aspects of society and culture of several Latin American countries during the second half of the nineteenth century.This is a great text for courses on Women’s Studies, Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, Gender Research, Critical Culture, Sexuality Studies, Cultural Analysis, Latin American Literature, Latin American Studies, Hispanic Literatures, Hispanic Studies.
