Gothic Echoes in Contemporary Flash Fictions in Spanish: A Voyage in/between Atlantic Shores.

Abstract

Recently, the microfictional genre has experienced an unprecedented boom in many literary traditions; in the case of literature in Spanish, this trend is especially noteworthy. However, the development of fantastic or uncanny topics stand out from many others within this expansion. Numerous authors have appreciated the condensation and instantaneity that this format allows in order to build extraordinary stories that break down the possibilities of what is plausible. Most particularly, in horror or gothic fictions, the brevity of flash texts seems even more timely. The transmission of a chill, of a restlessness that stirs reader’s fears, is more effective from the insinuation and ambivalence that a flash fiction articulates and suggests. In this essay, sustaining the Gothic as a generic category of proven legitimacy in our Hispanic literary tradition, we will aim at the study of four representative flash fiction volumes from diverse geographical origins: Cuentos malvados (2003), by Espido Freire; Ajuar funerario (2004), by Fernando Iwasaki; Casa de Muñecas (2012), by Patricia Esteban Erlés; and Historia siniestra (2015), by Alberto Chimal. Examining four of the central pillars of the Gothic corpus –death, the monster, the sinister house and the ominous– as reflected in these narratives, we will recognise the value of the renovation that the short fiction model has introduced into outmoded Gothic formulas. In turn, this study will give us the opportunity to reexamine and question the suspicion that Hispanic criticism has expressed towards the Gothic tradition, considering it alien or not integrated into the Hispanic fictional parameters.