The fantastic narrative, a genre rejected in Spain for years, despite the great boom it had in Latin America.

Abstract

If the Antología de la Literatura Fantástica (Anthology of Fantastic Literature), prepared by Silvina Ocampo, Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares, in 1940, meant the recognition of this type of narrative art as a genre in its own right and the revolt against the hackneyed realism, in Spain it is still somehow resisted and treated with contempt or mockery when any author incurs in this type of narrative that in the Peninsula is considered as a subgenre. The aim of this study is to demonstrate how in various ancient authors and even from Romanticism to the present day cultivated the narrative discourse of unreality as a genre. The methodological instrument has a qualitative, descriptive and documentary character, based on readings of texts in which the character of fantastic literature is demonstrated through fantastic attributes such as clocks, rings, mirrors, knives, paintings and elements such as demons, witches and other terrors that today, as the end of the first quarter of the XXI century approaches, are so fashionable and have reached the cinema, becoming one of the most sought after genres. In conclusion, in Spain, although it did not proliferate as much as in other parts of Europe and especially in Latin America, there was also a constant, although somewhat hidden, devotion to fantasy literature.