ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes to study a particular set of recurring Gothic motifs, those related to the countryside and its inhabitants as the primary carriers of the terrible and the ominous within Chilean literature. It analyzes Gothic fiction as an essential element of Chilean culture. The chapter explores how Gothic fiction treated potentially difficult, locally significant socio-political topics, such as rural banditry or the conquest of the Araucania, adapting an essentially international genre to specific national aesthetics and contents. Francisco Coloane's narrative oeuvre elegantly fusions a poetic yet realist image of southern Chilean spaces with heavily Gothic undercurrents, where nature itself often becomes the source of bizarre or downright terrifying situations. Although Coloane almost never recurs to traditional elements of the Gothic, the projection of Freud's "psychological reality" onto them produces a very similar, quite uncanny effect, making the natural world of the extreme south the true source of incomprehensible horror for those who live in it.
