Estudios de Teoría Literaria (Jul 2020)
Legacies of Mary Shelley: some corpses and monsters of nineteenth-century Argentine literature
Abstract
Mary Shelley´s Frankenstein (1818) is fundamentally remembered for the extraordinary pregnancy that the monster has achieved in nineteenth-century literature and mass culture of the twentieth. During the nineteenth century Argentine literature and, in particular, that of the 1870s and 1880s, formulated fictions in which hypotheses not yet verified by the experimental method or not academically recognized constituted narrative conflicts. I will deal with some scientific fantasies and Argentine horror stories: first, the world of science and scientific ethics in the experimentation with corpses and in another articulated as a travel diary of an adventurous naturalist who travels through northern Russia (Dr. Whüntz, 1880, by Raúl Waleis, El tipo más original, 1878, by Eduardo Holmberg, respectively). Second, the gothic uses of bodies and female writing in some stories by Raimunda Torres and Quiroga (1879-80) and, finally, a proposal that also involves electricity in order to create life in "The artificial man" "(1910) by Horacio Quiroga. The Faustian sages who have a magnificent model in Victor Frankenstein are the dramatization of the scientific ethics in triumphant modernity, from his most distrustful gaze.
