Written in Exile: Chilean Fiction from 1973-Present

On September 11, 1973, Chile’s General Pinochet led a quick and brutal military coup ousting the Allende government. Ignacio Lopez-Calvo argues that the rise of the Pinochet dictatorship and the subsequent imprisonment of any Allende sympathizers shaped Chilean narrative into two structural forms: liberationist narrative–cathartic, journalistic testimonies that provide models for revolutionary behavior against authoritarianism and demystifying narrative, which uses the events of 1973, as well as the colonial aspirations of European countries, as a Paradise Lost backdrop in which the characters of this type of fiction are able to create their non-political realities that become models of democratization.