Detective literature by María Angélica Bosco, pioneer of the genre in Argentina

Abstract

This paper has as its object of analysis two works by the Argentine author María Angélica Bosco (1909-2006): La muerte baja en el ascensor (1954/5) and La muerte soborna a Pandora (1956). They have been considered from a literary perspective of pointing out the connections between her literary production and her poetics and a linguistic perspective in the search for evidence of a "feminine writing" in a genre in which male writers predominate. The poetics has been reconstructed from diverse epitexts and metatexts, especially interviews and journalistic articles, and its concretion is analyzed in these two novels by the author who, by cultivating the detective genre, differentiated herself from other contemporary local women writers.

The objectives were oriented to consider a novel taken from the extensive work of this author that has been brought to the present day by Ricardo Piglia in his collection "Serie del Recienvenido" (2013); to describe the poetic relationship between author and literary production and, finally, to notice the gravitation of female gender issues in her police narrative. The methodological task consisted mainly in a heuristic instance of analysis of the literary discourse and the different epitexts and metatexts that contain her authorial poetics and the representations of her figure collected by the specialized journalism.