2021/11/23 by Lena Abraham, Abraham, Lena
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #19th century #Cinema History and Criticism #Latin American Literature Studies #Mexican literature #Photographic and Visual Arts #decadentism #modernism #murder #narrative violence Licencia
paper · doi:10.23692/imex.1.7
openalex publication_date 2021/11/23 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/01
74-92 This article reviews murder as an aesthetic creation in the short story 'Blanco y Rojo' by Bernardo Couto Castillo. It discusses the different functions that violence can play in narrative as well as the relationship between literature and morality. To understand the specific role of murder in Bernardo Couto's 'Blanco y Rojo', we review the aesthetic proposal of the Mexican decadentistas of the late nineteenth century, who were frequently labeled as immoral by their contemporaries. We will see that, in the case of Couto’s story, the violence does not lie so much in the content, the narration of a murder, but in the fact of violating the moral and literary creation norms of his time, the Porfiriato.