Somewhat belatedly, Spanish cultural critique is beginning to catch up with the Gothic. Certainly there have been Gothic texts produced in Spain for at least the last two centuries while arguably earlier productions, such as the tale of Don Juan and its ghostly statue, prefigure the start of what we consider to be the Gothic in the eighteenth century. It is just that recognition of such texts as Gothic has occurred only recently. This state of affairs is not only the result of a process of catch-up as Hispanic Studies follows the paths of disciplines such as cultural studies, paths already well trodden by others. Abigail Lee Six, herself one of the few scholars writing on Spanish Gothic, observes that ‘Hispanic Studies has tended to be excessively isolationist in its approach to certain literary trends’ (Lee Six 2010, 11), and I fully concur with this. I would extend this criticism still further to argue that such isolationism can apply to wider cultural trends. This perhaps follows from Spain's history over the past two centuries, somewhat semi-detached from events elsewhere in Europe, such as the two World Wars, in conjunction with a tendency to read texts only in terms of national history. Genre, as a mode that crosses national borders or indeed takes no notice of them, is often neglected even though genre can prove a ready vehicle for bringing ideas into a national culture while also allowing that culture to contribute to the sum of the genre.

Nonetheless, in terms of the Gothic, such neglect in Hispanic Studies also arises from Gothic's overwhelming focus on British Gothic texts, with some space allowed for American texts as well. There are good reasons for this: the Gothic as we know it today is generally thought to have begun with Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764), followed fairly swiftly by the works of Ann Radcliffe and then Matthew Lewis. Yet a consolidated scholarly interest in Gothic production from other nations and cultures and in other languages has recently come to fruition in the last decade or so, as has interest in Gothic cultural flow, defined as globalgothic by Glennis Byron (2013a) and Justin D. Edwards and Fred Botting (2013).