Literature, at least in Latin America, has not been the same since 1998, when Roberto Bolaño’s Los detectives salvajes (The Savage Detectives) was published, and especially since 2004, with the posthumous publication of 2666. This impact has earned him supporters and critics; thousands on both sides. That is why he is being reread, which suggests that Bolaño, without ever imagining it, ended up becoming what Italo Calvino defined as a classic, an author whose work “has never exhausted all it has to say to its readers” (5).

The 1840s were a key period for Chile regarding academic, literary, journalistic, artistic, educational, and political events. From this point on, a series of events were unleashed, as in chain reaction, which marked the country during the second part of the nineteenth century: the foundation of the Universidad de Chile (University of Chile), whose first chancellor was Andrés Bello; the inauguration of the Sociedad Literaria (Literary Society) in the main hall of the aforementioned university, with a memorable speech by José Victorino Lastarria;1 the foundation of the first Escuela Normal de Preceptores (Normal Teachers’ School) in 1842; the arrival of French painter Raymond de Monvoisin in January 1843, which led to the opening of exhibitions and the first art salons in Chile; the emergence of the first cultural magazines2 in Valparaíso, thanks to the influence of Argentine exiles like Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and Juan Bautista Alberdi; and the establishment in 1846 of a new Printing Law.3

The development of Mapuche literature, like Latin American literature, is unthinkable outside of the tension and conflict that translation has imposed upon it since the Conquest. As such, like Latin American literature, it emerges out of the first intersemiotic translation practices that Spanish missionaries carried out in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, during the colony.

A new generation of readers and scholars of Gabriela Mistral (1889–1957) are reinvigorating her work by using feminist, decolonial, and queer approaches that openly acknowledge her work’s ambivalence regarding feminism and race, map her participation in transatlantic networks, and broaden her corpus through numerous new editions. These new perspectives reject the normative, matriarchal image of Mistral cultivated by the Chilean state and recognize Mistral’s extraordinary experiences as a diplomat and educator in addition to the intersectional nuances of her poetry and nonfiction. Widely read during her lifetime, she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1945, the first Latin American author to receive it.

The Mapuche were subjugated first by the Spaniards and then by the Chileans. Throughout the twentieth century they suffered massacres at Forrahue (1912) and Ranquil (1934), along with the dispossession of their lands through scams and tricks. Since the beginning of the 1990s, they have demanded their right to their ancestral lands through political means and by exercising their right to subversion. As a result, the first Chilean government of the period known as the transición chilena (Chilean transition to democracy from 1990 to 1994) accomplished one of the most important changes in the relations between the state and the country’s first nation: the juridical recognition of the existence of indigenous groups and communities in Chile. Although it was a major achievement for Chile, this law was a minor response to Mapuche protest, which had been articulated through different symbolic productions, including poetry.

Any discussion on Orientalism in Chile must necessarily refer to Edward Said: his book, Orientalism, first published in English in 1978, provided a reflection on the way in which the West has represented the East. Engaging with Foucault’s notion of discourse and its potential to manage, and even invent, the “Orient,” Said stated that Orientalism was a Western strategy for dominating, restructuring, and asserting authority over the “Orient” (3).

In his Tropics of Discourse, Hayden White recalls Northrop Frye’s arguments regarding the structure of poetic fictions. According to Frye, there are a limited number of ways in which a storyline can be set in motion: comedy, tragedy, romance, epic, or satire. White, however, extends Frye’s ideas to history: a historical narrative will also inevitably take the shape of one of these genres.

Isabel Allende’s life and work defies national and categorical boundaries. A Chilean born in Peru in 1942 to parents of Spanish-Portuguese descent, Allende holds US citizenship and has resided in California since 1988. With the publication of La casa de los espíritus (The House of the Spirits) in 1982, she was catapulted to international literary stardom, and has since received numerous literary and honorary prizes, and sold approximately seventy-five million books worldwide. Her twenty-three books have been translated into forty-two languages.

Chilean literary criticism demonstrates enormous mutability in relation to its definition, approaches, and understanding of its exercise, which has been significantly transformed with the introduction of new paradigms, aesthetic perspectives, and theoretical resources from different disciplines. To illustrate this situation, one may consider the distance between Alone and Cedomil Goic.

The task of reconstructing or synthesizing events in the Chilean literary market in the nineteenth century is undoubtedly challenging since there are multiple potential approaches. I have chosen to face the challenge by taking as a common thread the cultural press of the 1800s, which, given its material and discursive dynamism, allows us to account for the technical, aesthetic, institutional, political, and educational aspects that made possible the emergence of a specific “literary field”1 endowed with a series of “institutionalizing instances”2 that ensured its visibility and separation from other social practices.

The long process of modernization, which in the Western world manifested itself as a maelstrom of contradictions due to huge demographic upheavals, unprecedented urban growth, a burgeoning state bureaucracy, and technological advances that resulted in uneven industrial development and socioeconomic prosperity, started in Chile soon after its independence in 1810 and lasted until 1973, the beginning of Pinochet’s military dictatorship. This process of rapid changes, confusion, and excitement, which accompanied Chile’s entry into the expanding and fluctuating capitalist world market, occurred in two phases.

Chile has always been a receptive country in matters of immigration. Indeed, in 1824, the objective of migration policies was to populate the territory and boost economic development. Thus, during the nineteenth and part of the twentieth century, Germans, Croatians, English, French, Italians, and Spaniards (the latter from the sixteenth century to the present) arrived in southern Chile. Asian emigrations of a smaller size (Arabic, Jewish, Armenian, Korean, Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese, Pakistani) also arrived.

It is worthwhile probing why Alejandro Zambra’s revisionist prose – with its ponderous ideas and conceptual reach, semantic reconstructions, dissemination in various media, apolitical timeliness, and relations to motley literary caretakers – is repeatedly accepted, mentioned, quoted, and cherished in worldwide interpretative communities as one of the most innovative younger writers today.

In his book The Picture of Dorian Gray, published in 1890, the Irish writer Oscar Wilde cited a text by an unknown Jesuit or, rather, what that Jesuit had heard, when he referred to the “flutes of human bones” (114) made by certain indigenous people after they defeated Spanish soldiers on the southern border of the Viceroyalty of Peru. This was a sort of cannibalism, but which ended with musical performance and ritual consummation.1 The most likely explanation is that Wilde had read a curious partial translation into English from 1703 of a book written by the Chilean Jesuit Alonso de Ovalle (1603–1651) that was published in Rome in 1646.