The theater of the opinion. Press, politics and reading after the revolution in the Río de la Plata

Abstract

How many newspapers were sold in Buenos Aires in the years that go from the revolution to the fall of Juan Manuel de Rosas? The question point out a dark spot in the historiography of the Argentine press and editorial culture, but also in the studies of political and intellectual history, since it presupposes in its formulation another no less difficult to answer: how many were its readers? Who had material access to the newspapers? The present work is an attempt to advance in a field still little known of the culture lettered in century XIX. Divided in two parts, the first presents a description of the formal and discursive resources in the formation of the public opinion –centered on the modes of fictionalization of opinion, through announcements and correspondences–, while the second part proposes an approximation analytical to its empirical counterpart, that is, an examination of the possible particulars readers of newspapers, by analyzing the costs and wages in two significant and equidistant periods.