"Lope de aguirre en el surgimiento de la nueva novela histórica hispanoamericana".

Abstract

If there is a historical figure in 20th-century Latin American literature who has given rise to conflicting versions of the same historical event, it is Lope de Aguirre. The Basque conqueror, whom we know with the face of the actor Klaus Kinski, was immortalized in 1972 in the film Aguirre, the wrath of God by the German Werner Herzog and with it he has transcended the Hispanic-American world to become an icon. Four hundred and fifty years after the death of the Basque conqueror, around one hundred works are known including chronicles, reports, letters, monographs, historiographical studies, biographies, testimonies, psychiatric diagnoses, stories, novels, essays, films, comics and plays dedicated to to represent the figure of the marañón leader. These works are characterized by marking a dichotomous vision of the character: some support and preserve his diabolical image, while others glorify him as the precursor of the independence in the Americas. It is from the seventies when, in the midst of the reappearance of the genre of the historical novel in Latin America and the revaluation of the Discovery and Conquest of the continent by the academy, that this conqueror fully acquires the category of literary character and exhibits a complex transformation in the two representative works of this moment: Daimón (1978) by the Argentine writer Abel Posse and Lope de Aguirre, Príncipe de la Libertad (1979) by the Venezuelan Miguel Otero Silva. This thesis studies the appearance of the historical character in the main texts that precede these two novels, with the aim of studying the complex process by which Lope de Aguirre detaches himself from his historical identity —overcoming the debate around his figure as the first half of the 20th century—and adopts other faces of American history.

Date of Award	2012
Original language	Spanish
Awarding Institution	Universidad de Sonora