The Gothic Tradition in Spanish America
Open Access
- Author:
- Alvarez, Jose Jyoti
- Graduate Program:
- Spanish
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- January 28, 2013
- Committee Members:
- Sophia A Mcclennen, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
John Andres Ochoa, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Sophia A Mcclennen, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Nicolas L Fernandez Medina, Committee Member
Sanford Ray Schwartz, Special Member
Djelal Kadir, Special Member - Keywords:
- Spanish American Literature
Gothic Literature
Comparative Literature
Nineteenth Century
Twentieth Century - Abstract:
- The Gothic Tradition in Spanish America is a historical and literary account of the inception, transformation, and disappearance of gothic fiction in Spanish American literature. This study demonstrates that gothic, which is usually perceived as a minor and foreign genre, was imported into Spanish America along with the modernizing literary and scientific discourses brought into circulation after the Wars of Independence (1808-1833), at a moment when the recently emancipated nations were engaged in projects of political, social, and cultural modernization. As the century advanced and as modernistas changed the rules of literary production and reception, gothic transformed, adapting its traditional motifs and its overall format to the new market conditions. Toward the 1940s, when writers like Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares undertook the purgative and reformative project known as literatura fantástica, gothic was perceived as an uncomfortable and undignified influence tainting the origins of Spanish American literary prose, and was consequently elided. By unveiling connections between texts as diverse as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), H.G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), Juan Vicente Camacho’s “Confesión auténtica de un ahorcado resucitado” (1861), and Adolfo Bioy Casares’s La invención de Morel (1940), this study connects the traditional gothic lineage with the aesthetic projects of modernismo and literatura fantástica. Aside from describing the processes through which these influential Spanish American aesthetic movements adapted, assimilated, and concealed their gothic inheritance, this project offers a way to creatively rethink gothic fiction outside the Anglo-Saxon tradition, and to reexamine the origins of what we call Spanish American literature.