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.