The last few decades of the nineteenth century were a crucial period in which the social role of the writer in Latin America was radically transformed. For the first time in history the Latin American writer was able to make a career as a writer. No longer at the beck and call of a Maecenal figure, he could make a living directly from the investment of his readers in his published work. The Argentine Eduardo Gutiérrez, for example, sold so many copies of his newspaper serial novel, Juan Moreira (1879) – it was serialized in La Patria Argentina from 28 November 1879 until 8 January 1880 and then re-issued as a book – that he managed to purchase a country estate in San Juan de Flores from the royalties (Hart, ‘Public Execution’ 675). Some writers of this period made a conscious decision to tailor their writing based on what their readers wanted; the Brazilian Bernardo Guimarães deliberately began to write potboilers since he knew he could make a living out them (see the discussion of A escrava Isaura below, pp. 118–19). This was the time when the novel, as the Mexican essayist, Ignacio Altamirano, suggested, ‘dejando sus antiguos límites, ha invadido todos los terrenos y ha dado su forma a todas las ideas y a todos los asuntos’ (quoted in Rama, Crítica 77), It was not only the novel which benefited from the enormous rise in readership; José Hernández's epic poem, Martín Fierro (Part I, 1872; Part II, 1879), was published in eleven editions in barely six years and sold 48,000 copies (Hart, ‘Print Culture’ 166). But there was a cost involved since this pandering to public taste inevitably involved a gear-shift down from the pedestal previously occupied by the writer as genius (in the sense of Shelley's ‘unacknowledged legislator of mankind’); now the writer was rubbing shoulders with the hoi polloi as a journalist. Many writers of this period resented what was happening to art as a result. As the Colombian poet, Julián del Casal, put it: