Violence and child characters in four Bolivian twentieth-century tales

Abstract

In this article, different forms of violence (physical, institutional, symbolic) are analyzed as the central topic of a variety of Bolivian tales from the second half of the twentieth century. The principal corpus of this study is composed by stories in which child characters have certain relevance, either because the storytellers recall the violence they witnessed when they were young, or because children constitute the starting point of the story, so as to symbolize much wider realities, non-exclusive of a Latin American country in particular.