This book has twin aims: one is to offer a deepened understanding of Adelaida García Morales's fiction through reading her texts as Gothic, for it is my contention that such a reading can shed new light on how she achieves the extraordinary haunting effect of her narratives. The second aim depends on the success of the first: it is to demonstrate by this example of one writer the usefulness of the Gothic label to Hispanic Studies generally and as such, the present monograph is the first in a larger research project which hopes to put the term Gothic on the Hispanic map, beyond its current very occasional or limited uses.

The notion of Gothic is well established in English studies and yet there is no critical consensus on a precise definition of it. Different criteria have been proposed and different strands of criticism can be discerned, all of them valuable in their way, but none completely reliable or self-sufficient. These include the historical approach, which regards Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764) as the seminal Gothic work, with a cluster of followers in the late eighteenth century, including works by Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis. In this period, which prided itself on its enlightenment, espousing neoclassical values, but which also was a time of social upheaval and increased class mobility, the concept of Gothic represented medieval barbarism and superstition but also the allure of a nostalgically idealized representation of chivalry and the clear-cut hierarchy of feudalism. Linked to this positively perceived aspect of pre-enlightenment values, there was a new attitude to aesthetic criteria in the eighteenth century, which no longer accorded a monopoly of approval to the classical ideals of proportion, balance and symmetry, but which discovered the sublime in rugged landscapes and huge mountain panoramas as well as rambling medieval architecture.

Then scholars adopting a historical approach recognize a resurgence of the Gothic towards the end of the nineteenth century with a group of texts that include Bram Stoker's Dracula, Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, among others. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein earlier in the century can be viewed as a late member of the first wave, or a precursor, of the second in this historical approach.