Análisis literario del cuento de terror contemporáneo en el Ecuador

Abstract

The horror story, in general terms, was born and developed since the first gothic novel: “El Castillo de Otranto (1764) of Horace Walpole that presents environments, characters, and situations that are familiar for us nowadays. It was developed in Europe and North America. Then in the middle of the XIX century this style arrived to Latin America where writers as Horacio Quiroga, Leopoldo Lugones, Juana Gorriti and currently Fernando Iwasaki are referents of the horror story. This investigation seeks to analyze the genre of horror in Ecuador. Therefore, the concept of horror has been studied from different perspectives as well as the origin and the development of the genre in the Ecuador and in the world to be able, through it, to analyze the horror stories that have been written in the country in the last decades. In Ecuador, the horror story started with “Gaspar Blondin” written by Juan Montalvo. Then it continued with writers as Honorato Vázquez and Francisco Campos. Later in the first decades of the XX century, it would be Pablo Palacio and Cesar Davila Andrade the responsible to develop the horror story thanks to their incursion into the oneiric and the psychological side. The developed corpus of this study is comprised by stories (one for each author) of Juan Montalvo, Honorato Vázquez, Francisco Campos, Pablo Palacio, César Dávila Andrade, Galo Enrique Silva, José Rodrigo Sánchez, Mario Conde, Ney Yépez, Gabriela Alemán and Augusto Rodríguez.