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Paper short abstract:

This paper concerns the arrival of Gothic Science literature in Brazil, and selects a 1925 novel for analysis. As a variation on the classic The Island of doctor Moreau, the novel explores a mad zoology created by a man of science, ethical limits of scientific experiments and conceptual horror.

Paper long abstract:

The intersection of the Gothic novel and the Scientific romance played an important role in early science fiction. This paper aims to trace the arrival of the so-called Gothic Science in Brazilian literature. To this end, we focus on a work by the Brazilian novelist Gastão Cruls, A Amazonia Mysteriosa (1925), a novel that echoes H. G. Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau.

In the tradition of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, as a keen observer of the medical debates of his time, Cruls tackles a form of horror out of the disruptive aspects of modern science, and chooses the Amazon rainforest as his setting, thus evoking Alberto Rangel's Green Hell and Doyle's The Lost World.

The plot develops the story of a fictional German scientist who conducts secretive experiments in a fabled land of Amazon women, hidden in the unknown depths of the forest.

Far from the censorious gaze and public uproar, as a bold and ruthless man of science in a secluded environment, the villain decides to engage in a highly unethical project of his own, designed to explore the plasticity of life forms: a scientific enterprise to defy the taxonomical paradigm, using chemical, endocrine and surgical technologies to blur boundaries between species, including those between humans and animals. The end result is a kind of Linnaean nightmare in a land of mythical utopia and fabricated dystopia.