Abstract

The Gothic is not a lens through which Latin American literature traditionally has been analyzed; however, there is a rich tradition of Gothic literature in Latin America. By examining literature through the Gothic one can discover new elements that have previously been overlooked and create new interpretations. In this dissertation I explore the Latin American Gothic tradition and demonstrate how it is different from that of Europe and North America. I dedicate particular attention to the living dead metaphor, which, as I argue, has become a marked characteristic of the Latin American Gothic. There are distinctive differences between the literary traditions of Brazil and Spanish America and I explore the way the Gothic factors into these differences.

In the first chapter I explore how the Gothic was used in the nineteenth century to comment on the situation of the Indigenous in Brazil by exploring Ana Luísa de Azevedo Castro's novel Dona Narcisa de Vilar and Jóse de Alencar's novel Iracema, a novel that I argue can be classified as Gothic, and upon doing so, enables critics to offer a new reading of the text. In chapter two I analyze the Gothic as a powerful abolitionist discourse in Brazil and Cuba through my readings of Maria Firmina dos Reis' Úrsula and Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda y Arteaga's Sab. Chapter three focuses on the way the Gothic is employed as a mechanism to expose the social and psychological legacy of slavery as seen in Marilene Felinto's As mulheres de Tijucopapo and Lúcia Miguel Pereira's Cabra cega. Finally, in chapter four I analyze how the Gothic is used to question modernity. I argue that one can observe a fear of modernity in Spanish American modernism as seen in the writings of Rubén Darío and Julián del Casal. Other writers have employed the Gothic to demonstrate that modernity has not delivered the changes for which they had hoped. Raquel Jardim denounces the limitations imposed on women by patriarchy and Fernando Vallejo exposes the horrors of daily life in Colombia due to the overwhelming violence caused by guerilla warfare and the drug trade.