La "zona desierta" de lo fantástico argentino: narradoras en la primera mitad del siglo XX

Abstract

Between 1850 and 1950, the history of fantastic Argentine literature, generally speaking, recognises only two women writers: Juana Manuela Gorriti and Silvina Ocampo. The wide time gap that exists between these two authors seems to indicate that the fantastic was not a genre favoured in women’s writing. Recent studies have contributed to filling that gap, pointing to Eduarda Mansilla and Raimunda Torres y Quiroga as assiduous collaborators in nineteenth-century magazines and newspapers, where they continued the path traced by Gorriti. However, there is still a period of about five decades in which, apparently, women writers did not occupy themselves with fantastic short stories. This ‘wild zone’ – which is verified in anthologies and studies of the genre – is striking, as it contradicts what happened in that geographical territory in that period, when Darío (based in Buenos Aires in the 1890s), Lugones, Holmberg and Quiroga published works that led to the fantastic short story acquiring the status of canonical literature. While it is true that female authors did not achieve the recognition that the aforementioned writers did, they did venture into fantastic literature, but their works remained, for the most part, on the pages of periodicals.

This paper is a modest contribution to the difficult task of recognising women writers’ participation in fantastic Argentine literature at the beginning of the last century. For this purpose, five practically unknown short stories by María del Carmen Alonso, Olga de Adeler, Lola S. B. de Bourguet, Alfonsina Storni and Emma Felce are analysed from a gynocritical perspective.