Literatura y secularización en Clemente Palma: teología, ficción y moral en Cuentos malévolos.

In the context of the correlations between literature and secularization in Spanish American Modernism, in this paper I aim to identify the main ways in which Clemente Palma questions traditional morality in Cuentos Malévolos. By analyzing first some paratexts of the book, four main ways are identified for the revision of that morality, a rereading that is explained from the positivist and Nietzschean parameters that Palma takes as a reference. At the same time, and as a counterpoint, an attempt is made to discover some of the contradictions of this revision, which are due to both the limitations of Palma's own ideological framework and to the demands of the secularization discourse itself, which always needs the sacred to define itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]