The Early Spanish Gothic Novel (1800–34)

Abstract

This chapter centres on the rise of the Spanish Gothic novel between 1800 and 1834. The Gothic novel in Spain at this point subdivided into two categories, what we could call ‘Spanish terror’ or the supernatural explained, best epitomised by Spain’s only early writer to practise the Gothic assiduously, Pascual Pérez Rodríguez, and the non-supernatural anti-Inquisition novel, exemplified by Luis Gutiérrez’s Cornelia Bororquia (1801) and Joseph Blanco White’s Vargas: A Tale of Spain (1822). Pérez Rodríguez’s text is indicative of the type of cultural adaptation the British and French Gothic novel experienced in the early-nineteenth century, while Gutiérrez and Blanco White’s belong, in their revolutionary spirit, to anticlerical fiction.