Carmen Martín Gaite’s creative and communication theory in her literary and historical background

Abstract

This article examines Carmen Martín Gaite's theory of literary creation and its connection to a communicative perspective on literature. Through a discourse analysis, four main categories have been identified: author, reader, text, and context, as well as various subcategories. The results show that, according to the author, a work of fiction is a space of collaboration between the author and the reader where the former must select and organise the elements of the text to make the story believable and invite the reader to engage, while the latter must strive to maintain their attention on the text and interpret it in their own way. Martín Gaite developed a unique literary theory that can be related to the fundamental concepts of pragmatics of literary communication.