La vampira santificadaSarah Ellen en la tradición popular y literatura peruana

Resumen

Sarah Ellen embodies a paradoxical “historical” Gothic myth in the popular culture of contemporary Peru. According to tradition, this English woman who died and was buried in 1913 in the coastal city of Pisco, was accused of vampirism in her native England. For this reason, she would have voyaged to South America; her grave is just the only thing left of her. However, this has not been an obstacle for this place to become a site of pilgrimage for the supposed miracles that this “holy vampire” can work. This unheard of character, who rests between reality and myth; the holy and the profane; romanticism and post- modernism; the literary and the popular will allow us to explore the capacity of the Gothic -and of a figure as central to it as the vampire- to acclimate to the Peruvian popular tradition. Additionally, in consonance, we will analyse the peculiar postmodern review of Gothic topics of European import carried out by the writer Carlos Calderón Fajardo in his work El viaje que nunca termina (La verdadera historia de Sarah Ellen) (2009).