Resumen

LOPEZ BADANO, Cecilia. Eva Perón: from the political body to the literary exquisite corpse. Letras [online]. 2008, vol.50, n.77, pp.103-124. ISSN 0459-1283.

The “official” story about Eva Perón is woven from a death that re-means her brief and intense political life and creates the posthumous myth: the embalming, which gives a spectacular dimension to a dead body, impedes the naturalness of an equalizer death, makes her a conflictive corpse and forces her into the legend of her incorruptible body that has become a traveling historic memory: a rebel. This legend is materialized in that mummy in rebellion that will not accept a future that is as uncertain as the future of Peronism without her. Literature takes and fictionalizes that macabre story into versions that go from awe to rage, from hate to the parody of sanctification. On the basis of the above statement this paper presents some of the historic facts related to Evita’s corpse, as well as a review of literary fictionalization discourses that result from it, considering the most prestigious Argentinian writers (Borges, Cortázar and those who followed) and other Latin-American authors (Galeano, Onetti).

Palabras clave : Literary Evita; fictionalization of the corpse; literary uses of a historic corpse; Evita exquisite corpse.