Chilean Literature as World Literature

How can we understand the production of Chilean literature in our globalised age? Chilean Literature as World Literature: 1990–2025 brings together leading international critics and theorists exploring the production, circulation, and reception of Chilean literature in times of political and economic upheaval.

This groundbreaking volume considers neoliberalism, post-dictatorship, territory, and Indigenous movements as major nation- and world-making processes, and sheds light on the dynamics of Chile’s publishing industry, this recent period of production and its international circulation and reception across various scales of the literary world. It features chapters on canonical world authors such as Isabel Allende and Roberto Bolaño alongside emerging voices like Alejandro Zambra, Nona Fernández, and Benjamín Labatut, as well as anti-canonical figures, exploring how memory, violence, human rights, gender, and cultural resistance have become key mediators of Chilean World Literature.

Essential reading for scholars and students of World Literature, this volume shows that understanding Chilean literature requires attention to multiple scales: the subnational, the national, the regional (Latin American), and the global.