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The great little genre. Reflections about the Hispanoamerican short story

Publication at Faculty of Arts |
2013

Abstract

A short story is a genre full of paradoxes: the human beings have been telling stories since ancient times, nevertheless the short story as a genre is not established till the 19th century; for its shortness it seems simple, but, in fact, it reaches in a limited space an immense narrative tension and it creates an autonomous world. In Hispanoamerica, the epoch called modernism (the turn of the 20th century) brings an enormous bloom of this genre and it represents a decisive step towards the modern literature.

The modernist short story offers two basic types: texts about the role of artists and their relationship with the society; and texts of fantastic nature. Both types of stories can be found in the work of Rubén Darío.