Abstract/Summary

Strangeness and horror are perhaps the most distinctive features of Cristina Fernández Cubas' narrative fiction. They infuse her work with an atmosphere of indefinable mystery that has often led critics cursorily to locate them within the aesthetics of the fantastic. Yet there are many moments in her work when such uneasy impressions constitute a purely intellectual experience: one that does not emanate from the reality depicted in the text, but rather from the way in which the human subject contemplates and processes this reality. This fact in itself places them in the realm, not of the fantastic, but of the uncanny. The main aim of this work is therefore to show how the sense of the uncanny constitutes both the central thread running through Fernández Cubas' work and the conceptual linchpin of her aesthetic and metaphysical vision.