La novela femenina en Chile de 1909 a 1991.

This study analyzes the development of the female novel in Chile throughout the twentieth century by focusing on four different novels which illustrate the development of a heightened individual consciousness in fiction and lead to the later undertaking of sociopolitical commitments from feminist positions. The four novels--Mariana Cox's La vida intima de Marie Goetz (1909), Maria Flora Yanez's Espejo sin imagen (1936), Mercedes Valdivieso's La brecha (1961) and Pia Barros' El tono menor del deseo (1991)--share the use of the first person narrator and the presence of a female voice that calls into question the cultural construction of women in different periods. The naturalistic vision of the world as an organic whole and the novel as its faithful reflection have given way to a fragmented and precarious representation of reality and the self, as well as to metatextual games which make the contemporary novel a multiple, open-ended and self-contained manifestation of the genre. By representing female subjectivity in fiction from an inner perspective, women have contributed in a significant though rarely recognized manner to the shaping of the contemporary novel in Chile. The early and abundant publishing of Chilean women novelists, closely related to the social activism in which women became involved and the access to high education they achieved in the nineteenth century, established a strong presence for them as writers. They were, however, mostly excluded in the shaping of a national literary canon. While their work was acknowledged and granted publication, it was confined to the classification of feminine literature, which arose out of a common double-standard for women writers. More recent feminist studies have also stressed the separate nature of female writing as a result of women's radically different experience in history, ignoring the interplay of recognitions and limitations with which Chilean women wrote. My work analyzes the narratological structures in which these novels convey women's increasingly complex perception of society and themselves from a perspective that takes into account their early presence in the public domain, their consciousness as writers and their ever-changing relationship with readers and critics.Ph.D.Language, Literature and LinguisticsLatin American literatureRomance literatureSocial SciencesWomen's studiesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/129210/2/9409758.pd