ABSTRACT
Nadina Estefania Olmedo talks about "echoes" of the Gothic in the literature and the cinema of the Southern Cone, with the hypothesis that throughout the twentieth century there is a "reinvention" of certain classic Gothic themes. This chapter argues that the corpus of turn-of-the-century stories can be described based on its two constituting branches. On one hand, its insertion in the Gothic and fantastic narrative tradition, whose European and North American models circulated in Buenos Aires; on the other hand, its close relation to science and pseudoscience topics popularized by the press. In Rio de la Plata, the strong presence of sciences in the social imaginary stimulated an original manifestation of Gothic literature, in which horror was able to speak the language of its period. "El almohadon de plumas" is paradigmatic of the discursive, aesthetic, and imaginary combinations that constitute Quiroga's narrative: an expressionist naturalism mixed with the fantastic, and a taste for horror combined with rhetoric of science popularization.
