La presencia espectral en la narrativa femenina transétnica desde 1975

Résumé

The spectral presence partakes in the collective imagination of all the cultures included in this investigation: Western, Hispanoamerican, Native, African and Chinese. Nonetheless, its presence in most of the 20th c. literature is almost non-existent. The critic Tzvetan Todorov wonders in 1971, “Why does the literature of the fantastic no longer exist?”; a question which was paradoxically dismissed in that very decade, when in the mid 70s the ubiquity of the spectral presence registered the so-called “spectral turn” in the humanities.Since then, the literary criticism of the spectral has embedded in the concept of “the spectre” some other fantastic motifs, itself becoming a hodgepodge. Thus, the object of study is, explicitly and exclusively, the spectral presence, understood as an immaterial being which, according to the Real Academia Española, represents an “image of a dead person who appears to the living”. Therefore, the terms spectre, ghost, spirit, revenant and ectoplasm are considered synonyms throughout this work.This dissertation will not consider those texts previously labelled “spectral” that include other common elements such as doppelgangers, projections, vampires, zombies, monsters or metamorphoses without including any spectral beings. Likewise, as these pages intend to recover the essence of the spectrality, they also exclude themes traditionally ascribed to it, namely insanity, dreams, santeria, syncretism, witchcraft and identity theft, as well as the allegory of the spectral woman...