Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Persistence of the Gothic

Abstract

First paragraph: In the prologue to her book Galería fantástica [Fantastic Gallery] (2009), the Argentine critic and writer María Negroni states that what has thus far been defined as fantastic literature in Latin America is, in fact, Gothic literature: a literary corpus that she describes as "nocturnal and feverish" (9). It is Gothic’s unruly and chaotic nature—contrary to the "Enlightenment's geometry of knowledge" (9)—that allows her to read Latin American writers and poets such as Carlos Fuentes, Felisberto Hernández, Rosario Ferré, Alejandra Pizarnik, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Julio Cortázar, Octavio Paz, Horacio Quiroga, Silvina Ocampo, and Vicente Huidobro as Gothic authors whose oeuvre reshapes Latin American fantastic fiction and creates a new form that defies the "prisons of reason and of common sense" (9). This, however, has not been the dominant stance among critics.