Chilean literature
The group were influenced by foreign intellectuals in Chile such as José Joaquín de Mora, Andrés Bello, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and Vicente Fidel López and made the first attempts to found a characteristically Chilean national literature movement.
Narrative literature had a more original style and included works such as José Victorino Lastarria's[14] "Peregrinación de una vinchuca"; Alberto Blest Gana's "Durante la reconquista" (During the reconquest) and "El loco Estero" (Estero the Mad, 1909); José Joaquín Vallejo's[15] "Artículos de costumbres" (Essays on customs); Vicente Pérez Rosales' "Recuerdos del pasado" (Memories of the past); and Daniel Riquelme's "Bajo la tienda" (Under canvas).
Other important writers of the generation were Daniel Barros Grez,[19] Eduardo de la Barra,[20] Zorobabel Rodríguez, José Antonio Soffia, Moisés Vargas and Liborio Brieba.
The first manifestation of this movement was "Flores de cardo" (Thistle flowers) by Pedro Prado in 1908, a work that broke with metric restraints and the rules of poetry.
[24] On December 22, 1914, Gabriela Mistral - who would later win the Nobel Prize in Literature - won the "Juegos Florales de Santiago" poetry contest, her first recognition as a great talent.
In 1938, Pablo de Rokha founded and managed the publishing house "Multitud", which distributed books in the United States, Russia and Latin America.
Pablo Neruda published the works "Crepusculario" and "Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada" in 1923 and 1924, as a prelude to the great success he would have in the next quarter century.
The Imaginist group, made up of writers Ángel Cruchaga Santa María,[25] Salvador Reyes, Hernán del Solar, Luis Enrique Délano[29] and Manuel Eduardo Hübner,[30] broke with the most prominent literary critics of the time.
Luis Enrique Délano said in an article about the origin of the Imagism: "We had not decided to innovate at all, but we had a common sense that Chilean literature was full of "Criollismo", cloying and heavy.
Contributors included Augusto d'Halmar, Mariano Latorre, Marta Brunet, Luis Durand,[33] Rosamel del Valle,[34] Juan Marín[35] and Jacobo Danke[36] among others.
La Mandrágora (Spanish for The Mandrake) was a Chilean Surrealist group founded on 12 July 1938 by Braulio Arenas (1913–1988), Teófilo Cid, Enrique Gómez Correa and Jorge Cáceres (who was still a teenager at the time).
Braulio Arenas also published the magazine "Leit-motiv" from 1942 to 1943, with contributions from André Breton, Benjamin Péret and Aimé Césaire, linking "La Mandrágora" with the French surrealists.
In 1957, Braulio Arenas, Enrique Gómez Correa and Jorge Cáceres published the anthology "El AGC de la Mandrágora", which included a surrealist dictionary and a bibliography of the Chilean surrealism.
[40] The neocriollistas — a name that can be translated as "neo traditionalist" - put a great emphasis on local customs and wanted to portray the life of the common people in a social and human way.
Brunet's play "Montaña adentro" (Into the mountain) is notable for its use of rural language and peasant slang to portray life in the country, while Allamand put special emphasis on children's literature and was one of the pioneers of this genre.
Among the writers taking part were Marcela Paz ("Papelucho"), who was also the first director of the Chilean IBBY, Maité Allamand, Chela Reyes, Gabriela Lezaeta, María Silva Ossa,[49] Amalia Réndic and Pepita Turina.
This was due to a combination of factors, including the ideological struggles of the time and the gradual professionalization of historical studies through the creation of institutes and specialized departments in different universities of Chile.
Conservative historians rejected modernity and proposed a substitution of representative democracy for authoritarian regimes to ensure the maintenance of social order and the Catholic faith.
The first, Marxist trend focused its efforts on the reconstruction and recovery of the history of Chilean working class, with writers including Julio César Jobet[60] and Hernán Ramírez Necochea.
[61] These authors were criticized for the political-ideological character of their work, though their legacy lived on through the later generation of the 1980s, who developed a new way of describing history focused on Chilean popular movements.
The second trend brought real innovation to the study of history, introducing new techniques and research methodologies borrowed from the new European historiography, particularly the French Annales School.
The 1973 Chilean coup d'état put an abrupt end to this process and repressed the new social historiography, forcing these historians and researchers to flee the country.
As a consequence of the vast changes during World War II, Chilean literature became more universal in its themes, focusing on problems common to the whole humanity and using new modes of expression.
Key poetic works included Nicanor Parra's "Poemas y antipoemas" (Poems and antipoems), Humberto Díaz Casanueva's "Réquiem", Eduardo Anguita's "Venus en el pudridero" (Venus on the garbage heap), Gonzalo Rojas' "Contra la muerte" (Against death), Jorge Teillier's "Muertes y maravillas" (Deaths and wonders), Fernando González Urízar's "Los signos del cielo" (Signs from heaven), Miguel Arteche's "Fénix de madrugada", (Phoenix at dawn) and Raúl Zurita's "Purgatorio" (Purgatory).
The mix of Magic realism and "family saga", for example, brought international fame to Antonio Skarmeta, Fernando Alegría, Gonzalo Rojas, Humberto Díaz Casanueva, Ariel Dorfman and Isabel Allende, Hernán Neira.
This "Nueva poesia chilena" included a great number of poets coming back from exile in Europe, with Raul Zurita, Rodrigo Lira, Antonio Arévalo[69] and Bruno Montané[70] among the most famous.
A new generation of writers has incorporated the fantastic or imaginative literature to which Omar Pérez Santiago belongs and his book of short stories Nefilim en Alhué (2011).
This trend modernizes the old school of gothic existential issues, the terrifying, the magical, the oneiric and the diabolical of popular culture, and which has its origin in María Luisa Bombal's La amortajada (1938), Elena Aldunate's Juana and cybernetics (1963) and Carlos Droguett 's Patas de perro (1965).
For example, while Gabriela Mistral was head teacher at the Girls' High School in Temuco, Chile, and already recognized as an outstanding poet, a teenage boy came to her with his own poems, asking for her opinion.
Despite this criticism, Neruda is recognized as one of the twenty six authors that make up the Western canon of literature, along with Shakespeare, Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes, Michel de Montaigne, Molière, Milton, Samuel Johnson, Goethe, Wordsworth, Jane Austen, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Tolstoy, Ibsen, Freud, Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, Borges, Neruda, Fernando Pessoa, Samuel Beckett.
