The chapter deals with the supposed absence of the fantastic short-story in Brazilian Literature, especially when compared to the Hispano-American Literatures. Having considered possible reasons for this gap, it calls attention to the fantastic in the regionalist short story of the turn of the 19th and 20th century.
Finally, it defends the hypothesis that this specific fantastic appeared as a reaction to the precipitous modernization constituting an interface between the cosmopolitan urban world and the arcaic one.