Fantastic Short Stories by Women Authors from Spain and Latin America

Book excerpt: This critical anthology renders visible the twentieth-century Spanish and Latin American traditions of the female fantastic, which presented alternatives to the model of literary realism. Not sufficiently known to readers, the five key short stories by Emilia Pardo Bazán, Amparo Dávila, Rosario Ferré, Cristina Fernández Cubas, and Ana María Shua collected in the book cover a range of cultural references and language specificities from Spain, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Argentina. They attest to the richness and diversity of fantastic fiction in the Spanish language. Corresponding analyses provide social contexts and feminist interpretations of such popular fantastic tropes as the revenant, the monster, the doll, the double, the haunted house, and the werewolf.