The “Cairé” and “The Ghost of Komat” Textual Landscapes and Cultural Heritage in Argentinean and Slovenian Folktales

Abstract

The present article proposes a comparative approach to Argentinean and Slovenian tales that share thematic features with ATU 326 (“The youth who wanted to learn what fear is”) from the standpoint of the fictional construction of verbal landscapes. The comparison is oriented to identifying similar narrative patterns dealing not only with thematic tale types but also with structural and stylistic features, along with changing details. The thematic, structural, and stylistic features common to different versions conform to a narrative matrix, which acts as a pretext to be recreated in diverse narrative contexts. The changing details give new meanings to universal pattern connected with the cultural heritage of different local contexts, such as the Argentinean and the Slovenian ones.