Reception of wild nature, mental illness and death themes in the stories of Horacio Quiroga

In the twentieth century, Reader-response criticism is an important method in which the person who receives the literary text is active in the process of analyzing literary works. Reader-oriented views emerge as a reaction to formalist and structuralist perspectives that completely ignore the reader in the literary criticism and place the reader at the center of the criticism process. Reader-oriented views attach importance to the reader as well as the text in the process of review and defend the view that a text can only exist as long as it is read by a reader. This study, entitled "Reception of wild nature, mental illness and death themes in the stories of Horacio Quiroga", aims to analyze Uruguayan writer Horacio Quiroga's works La miel silvestre, La gallina degollada and El almohadón de plumas which are included in the short stories book Cuentos de amor de locura y de muerte, using the parameters of Reader-oriented criticism. The selected stories for this study La miel silvestre, La gallina degollada and El almohadón de plumas allow the reader to have a conversation with the text by involving the reader in the reading process with their multi-layered structures in the narrative process and the explicit and implicit intext signs they contain. In this context, the main purpose of our study is to reveal how the reader received the wild nature in the story La miel silvestre, mental illness in La gallina degollada and the death themes in El almohadón de plumas, being written by Horacio Quiroga, a writer who directly experienced topics such as life in the wild nature and death throughout his personal life. Keywords: Horacio Quiroga, mental illness, wild nature, death, stories of love and madness and death