The New Frontier of the Fantastic: Hispanic American Women Writers on the Thresholds of Unreality

Introduction to the dossier

Abstract

Currently, the rise of fantastic literature cannot be understood without the fundamental presence of writers such as Mariana Enriquez, Samanta Schweblin, Mónica Ojeda, Liliana Colanzi, Giovanna Rivero, María Fernanda Ampuero, among others. One of the common features among the writers who have taken on the task of rethinking non-mimetic or unreal literature with new vigor is that many of them were born in the 1970s, turbulent decades in social and political terms for Latin America. This aspect is very significant, because despite the singularity of their writings, the treatment and renovation that they carry out of the unreality literature turns, mainly, in the conformation of a critique on the social and political history of their countries mediated, on everything, for the body, marginality, and violence. The literary production of these writers has prompted not only a questioning of classical theories on the specificity of fantastic literature and its singularity with respect to other forms of non-mimetic writing, but also the need to rethink a theoretical scaffolding for Latin American literatures of unreality. Nowadays, the works of these writers fully respond to the demands of a theoretical reconsideration on the specificity of the fantastic, since they make the integration of different discourses of unreality a nodal part of their generational and aesthetic proposal, an aspect that places them in a new frontier of the fantastic.