Bárbara Fernández Melleda
speaker
28 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2026
last heard 10 Jan
Bárbara Fernández Melleda’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Well, magical realism is certainly linked to Latin American literature and culture.
We can go to its roots, and I think it's based on two seminal novels.
One is 1949, Alejo Carpentier from Cuba, it's called The Kingdom of This World, and Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo, which is from 1955.
But in the case of Carpentier, he thought that there was a certain type of specific Latin American literature related
which entailed strange situations that happened actually in real life.
So in the case of this novel, The Kingdom of This World, he narrates the Haitian revolution from the perspective of a slave who can turn himself into an animal.
And the story includes elements that are fantastic, but they are not necessarily fantastic for non-Europeans.
For example, the extent to which voodoo practices work.
So from this moment on, one could say that magical realism emerged as a more Latin American established literary style of writing.
We could say that it was her and Gabriel García Márquez.
In the case of Isabel Allende, her texts became widely disseminated because the narratives were easier to follow and also that they integrated female characters in a more natural way and less based on a male gaze.
These texts were also very political, but we have to say that that was weaved in
a bit differently.
When Isabel Allende's first work is published, we can say that the most important Latin American authors at the time were male.
So she provided the literary world with female narrators first, and they were in charge of chronicling their own story.
So their own perspectives became relevant.
Because other novels, previous novels, were about sort of the founding fathers of Latin America or about male politicians, etc.,
The female voice wasn't there yet.
So that's also her contribution.
And also she establishes the idea of memory as a sort of intergenerational resistance device.
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