2.13 - The Gothic in Nineteenth-Century Spain

Summary

This chapter provides a survey of Gothic Spanish literature of the nineteenth century to continue the critical task of re-integrating Spain with the literary trends from which it has been traditionally separated. It traces the role of early translations of novels by British and French authors in creating a literary Gothic language in the early nineteenth century, before turning to the output of indigenous writers such as Agustín Pérez Zaragoza and José de Espronceda, as well as to the development of the ‘folletín’ (penny dreadful) in the 1840s. Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer’s historical legends (1857–71) mark another milestone in the development of an unmistakably Spanish Gothic tradition. The mad scientists that populate the short stories of José Fernández Bremón and Justo Sanjurjo López de Gomara illustrate the country’s ongoing participation in transnational tropes by the century’s close. Similarly, the Gothic becomes an effective tool to denounce women’s lack of agency in the short fiction of Emilia Pardo Bazán, a local offshoot of the border-crossing Female Gothic.