ABSTRACT
Displaying an amazing versatility, the melodramatic serial novel has become a “fenómeno cultural incombustible” (Romero Tobar 32) [indestructible cultural phenomenon], a genre that has continued to evolve, reinventing itself in different contexts and with different purposes (Herlinghaus 40; 51-52). Marina Mayoral (Mondoñedo, Lugo, 1942), conscious of the literary possibilities that melodrama offers, has taken advantage of melodramatic devices in her prolic narrative work, written in Galician and Castilian, and which is in large part set in rural and provincial Galicia. Her novels are characterized by what Jesús Martín Barbero calls in Narraciones anacrónicas de la modernidad, the melodramatic rhetorical excess (71) that accompanies the strategies of suspense, complicated plots, confused identities, impossible relationships, incest, and polarization. To the foregoing one can add, as Kathleen Glenn points out regarding the imprint of the serial novel in Mayoral’s ction, the “hyperbolic language and large doses of sentiment” (90).1
