Tzvetan Todorov typified the literary fantastic as an autonomous gender in 1970, separating it from marvelous texts and other bordering modes that contained unreal or supernatural elements. In the Latin-American Hispanic studies his model and several other views about fantastic literature encouraged an advancing body of important theorizing, more or less critical with his definition of the gender, finding or not correlations with French or Anglo-Saxon alternative approaches to Todorov’s taxonomist view. In Spain a consistent incorporation to the debate occurred much later thanks to Catalan researcher David Roas. In the present article it is presented a brief state of the investigation about the literary fantastic through the last 20 years in Hispanic studies, when the first reactions to structuralist visions of the subject were enriched by sociocritical, historic, psychologist and philological contributions. two particular, solid but conflicting approaches are analyzed as the opposed poles of a quite wide spectrum of different understandings and ways of doing literary fantastic: on one hand, Mexican scholar Ana María Morales philologist and intratextual-based view, and, on the other hand, Roas psychologist and actual-reader-response-based position. This accurately examined presentation shows the complex variety and the enormous interest of Hispanic studies theorizing about fantasy worlds.
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