The Lyrical Vision of Maria Luisa Bombal

This volume contains an examination of what are described as the most poetic examples of Chilean prose written in the 20th century. By adopting Ralph Freedman’s conceptual definition of lyrical narrative and using it as her point of departure, Professor Kostopolos-Cooperman argues that the protean and magical nature of Bombal’s lyrical prose transcends the causal, temporal and spatial movement that characterizes conventional fiction. In her view, Bombal’s work is rather a narrative that arises in the poetic imagination of a narrator who creates a tapestry of expanding musical and pictorial patterns frequently reflecting the inner lives of her protagonists - alienated heroines who withdraw into an illusory world of dreams, fantasies and idealized realities where the conflict between self and other is rendered through a suggestive and contemplative network of subjective associations.