Abstract
While it is evident that there are outstanding women authors of the fantastic in Spain and Latin America since the nineteenth century, it is not as clear whether these writers are fairly represented in the corpus available to readers. To what extent are women authors part of the fantastic canon? Are there female reference points for new generations of women writers? To explore processes of canon formation in the literature of the fantastic from a feminist perspective, this article gathers paratexts from 110 anthologies. Employing a quantitative approach with regard to indexed authors, the first section addresses specific questions related to gender and the fantastic in the Hispanic context by analysing statistical data. The empirical study is complemented by an analysis of how the female author is presented and constructed through the discourse in introductions, forewords and other paratextual materials of these anthologies.
Highlights
While it is evident that there are outstanding women authors of the fantastic in Spain and Latin America since the nineteenth century, it is not as clear whether these writers are fairly represented in the corpus available to readers
The average percentage of female writers included in Spanish-language anthologies gathering the work Latin American and Spanish authors – whether these anthologies had a Panhispanic focus
Working from an assumption that the more copies of a volume available in Spanish universities, the more this volume is used on their degree and masters programmes, this study identifies the anthologies of which greater numbers of copies were available: Cuentos fantásticos en la España del Realismo (2006, with only a 8% of female authors, item 9 in graphic), Cuentos fantásticos modernistas de Hispanoamérica (2003, with no female author, item 17) and Antología Española de Literatura Fantástica (1992, with only a 3% of female authors, item 2)
Summary
This research was triggered by the striking underrepresentation of female writers (regardless of their language and nationality) in the most widely distributed anthologies of the international fantastic, as borne out in some of the best known collections. The volume Antología de la literatura fantástica (1940), edited by Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo, is one of the most internationally reprinted anthologies of the fantastic It included authors from very different literary traditions and was instrumental in obtaining international recognition for lesser-known Hispanic writers. The selected data fulfilled the following criteria: the anthologies had include more than four different authors in a single volume; the title had to comprise one of the words ‘supernatural’, ‘sobrenatural’, ‘fantástico’, ‘fantastique’ or ‘fantastic’ and exclude other neighbouring terms such as terror, horror, scifi, fantasy, as well as references to ‘insólito’, ‘misterio’, ‘weird tales’, ‘uncanny’, ‘ghost stories’ or ‘histories maléfiques’ This generated a more coherent corpus within the parameters of the restricted approach to the fantastic, as developed mainly in European criticism, to distinguish it from the all-inclusive American term of ‘literatures of the fantastic’.3. In these volumes the inclusion of female writers outnumbers the average 13% (section 3.1.), mainly thanks to the tradition of the ghost story, greatly indebted to the writings of British and North-American women authors
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