Il fantastico femminile e le autrici ispanoamericane

In the last decades, the Fantastic Literature written by women has been the subject of various critical and theoretical works, which, from different standpoints, have tried to investigate the characteristics of the so called 'Female Fantastic': an extremely difficult task, if we take into account the wide range of concepts included in the heterogeneous notions of 'female' and 'female writing', whose theoretical survey has to be considered prior to any exploration of the 'Female Fantastic'. After a critical review of some of these most prominent theories about the Female Fantastic, this essay will try to point out through the close readings of "La celda" (1959), by Amparo Dávila, and "La casa de azúcar" (1959), by Silvina Ocampo, the function of the Fantastic written by women, which it is suggested lies in the subversion of the feminine models fixed by the masculine symbolic order and the patriarchal dominant discourse