![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() If Poe‘s tale climaxes in what might appear to be the annihilation of the feminine, Fuentes’ text, by contrast, can be read as offering a paradigm for women’s possible resistance and survival. From this perspective of the fantastic as practised by Poe and Fuentes as an essentially internal phenomenon, it will be shown how both texts create Gothic effects around a three-way relationship between the respective protagonists (in Poe, two men and a woman in Fuentes, two women and a man), using the convention of the decaying family residence as closed space to generate fantastic effects that reverberate on a psychological level. The Mexican novelist and exponent of the Latin American ‘boom’ is known to have been a long-term admirer of Poe, of whom he wrote in 2000: ‘Poe sustrae la tradición gótica de los escenarios externos y la instala en el interior de cada uno de nosotros’ (‘Poe removes the Gothic tradition from external scenery and installs it within each of us all’). ![]() This paper will pose the hypothesis of the existence of an inter-American dialogue between two key texts of, respectively, North American and Latin American fantastic literature: Edgar Allan Poe’s short story ’The Fall of the House of Usher’ (1839 Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, 1840 translation into Spanish by Julio Cortázar, 1956) and Carlos Fuentes’ novella Aura (1962 Cuentos sobrenaturales, 2007 parallel text edition with translation into English by Lysander Kemp, 1987). ![]()
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