Why is Efrain still crying or how we read María in the Twenty-Firsty Century

Abstract

Taking into consideration processes of reception of María (from Nineteenth-Century to current articles) this essay explores some textual aspects of this canonical novel not completely clarified yet by the precedent bibliography: the duality to the enunciation of the dedicatory, the tension between Efraín´s submissive discourse in his oral interventions and his mil opposition in his role as narrator, the socio-cultural prestige of tragedy, the process of canonization of the novel during its reception in Nineteenth-Century, as opposed to the condemning reading of our century.