Dona Barbara Unleashed : From Venezuelan Plains to International Screen

By comparing different screen adaptations of the story of Rómulo Gallegos’s notorious villainess, Doña Bárbara Unleashed reveals how over the years subversively strong female characters have become increasingly accepted by society and welcomed by audiences.

Since its publication in 1929, the story of Doña Bárbara has continued haunting the collective imagination of people of Latin American descent and has been adapted on various occasions both for the small and big screen. Doña Bárbara Unleashed explores how Rómulo Gallegos’s original story has been kept alive yet altered by subsequent screen adaptations. The book illustrates how both the film and telenovela adaptations have reinterpreted the story of Doña Bárbara in order to mirror changes in societal norms, such as the role of women in Latin American societies, and audience expectations. Specific attention is paid to the way in which in the twenty-first-century the spectators have played a crucial role in influencing the alterations to which Gallegos’s original plot has been subjected. Doña Bárbara Unleashed offers an original way of studying screen adaptations by putting a number of adaptations of the same source text in dialogue rather than simply comparing the individual adaptations with the source text. By further intertwining more traditional theories of screen adaptations with approaches emerging from fandom studies, this book unearths completely new ground, as existing studies on-screen adaptations have barely touched on the issue of audience responses.