Resumen de Gothic dreamscapes and landscapes in Soledad Acosta de Samper’s Teresa la limeña (1868) and ‘Un crimen’ (1869)
In this paper, I examine how other narratives by Acosta de Samper in Novelas y cuadros de la vida Sur-Americana (1869), such as the story Un crimen and the short novel Teresa la limeña, reveal divisions between urban and rural spaces and fantasy and reality that demonstrate the authors perceptions of pernicious places.2 The murder of the protagonists husband by armed men in the forest in Un crimen, and the mysterious illness and death of the protagonists husband in the countrys interior in Teresa, la limeña mark the forest as inhospitable and a home to violence. [...]descriptions of criminality and space call to mind political and social debates of the independence period and the tensions between humans and nature during its rapid development and expansion, in line with more recent theory on the ecogothic advanced by critics like Elizabeth Parker.3 Beyond this, spaces of dreams, nightmares, and imagination also serve to reveal terror typical of the Gothic mode in the texts, as Teresa la limeña includes a nightmare set in a cemetery, while Un crimen suggests the horrific possibility of the husbands murder initially through the protagonist Luzs imagination of what may have occurred when she hears distant shots. [...]numerous critics, such as Cristina Valcke and Catalina Rodríguez Rodríguez have discussed Acosta de Samper's work in the context of Latin American feminism, since the author wrote about women's roles in society.4 Acosta de Samper's novel Teresa la limeña details the suffering of the eponymous main character as she grows up in a religious school in France and then returns to Peru where she is engaged and married to a man chosen by her father. In his aforementioned recent study, Martínez-Pinzón has also explained some Gothic elements of Acosta de Samper's Dolores, arguing that Gothic influence is present in the description of the protagonist's illness, while connecting this topic to a discussion of racial identity at the end of the colonial period (391).5 These impacts of the Gothic mode in Acosta de Samper's fiction that Ordóñez and MartínezPinzón raise are vital and more such analyses are needed. [...]while the author includes intertextual lists of novels she likely read in her works, as Alzate has noted, she also signals the appropriateness of her reading list through her characters.
