Urban legends
Within the so called "urban folklore" we find the genre of urban legends. Others prefer the term "contemporary legends" since although they are associated with elements of globalized and urban culture (supermarkets, restaurant branches, fairgrounds, etc.), they do not always refer to cities. These narrations are similar to the ones described before and are characterized by a referencial continuity, that is, the insistence on credibility. The tension in the narrator is maximum while the distnace is minimum, in other words, the narrator tells the legend as if they were real events or at least as if they were possible. For this, the narrator uses common names for archetypical characters (seldomly do proper names come up: "the friend of a friend"), the legend is contextualised in places and spaces that are close and concrete, but in a slight temporal imprecision (recent past to the present). They are stories of unknown origen with amazing motifs or at the most alarming that evolve to an unexpected ending. The have the usual structure of discursive narrative (initial situation, conflict, evolution of the conflict, resolution and final situation). The are stories of unknown origen and easily migrated often along surprising channels but always related to some kind of oral transmission. Inspite of the variety of urban llegends and, the difficulty in classifying them, four groups have been considered: supernatural legends, legends about crimes, traditional "urbanized" legends and cyberlegends.
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