The Female Vampire in Hispanic Literature

a Critical Anthology of Turn of the 20th Century Gothic-Inspired Tales

DeVirgilis, Megan

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 and rising first-wave feminisms. The result was a trend of sympathetic female vampire characters, predating 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 Gothic traditions in the form of 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.