The Female Vampire in Hispanic Literature

Exploring Spain and Latin America's transhispanic Gothic connection.

This book exposes how Hispanic authors at the turn of the twentieth century broke from European and American Gothic models to contend with their anxieties over modernity. The rising tide of first-wave feminism resulted in a trend of sympathetic female vampire characters that predate comparable Anglo and European representations by several decades.

In its analysis of the female vampire in Hispanic literature, this critical introduction also traces the Gothic's origins and developments in Latin America and Spain, presenting a working theory of their Gothic traditions as a transhispanic literary phenomenon. The tales compiled in this collection include Leopoldo Lugones's "The Female Vampire" (1899), Clemente Palma's "The White Farmhouse" (1904), Antonio de Hoyos y Vinent's "Mr. Cadaver and Miss Vampire" (1910), Carmen de Burgos's "The Cold Woman" (1922), and Horacio Quiroga's "The Vampire" (1927). All but two of these tales are translated into English for the first time, and all appear alongside scholarly annotations and accompanying analysis.