"Escribid para el pueblo". Historias, costumbres y valores nacionales en el teatro chileno (1810-1879)

Abstract

The intention of this study is to deepen our knowledge of the interrelation between different Chilean plays based on ideas that were promoted by critics and intellectuals for the creation and promotion of a national literature in Chile in the 19th century. The intention is also to explain how these texts reflect and imagine the new Chilean nation-state. The corpus used for this study is made of plays written between 1810 and 1879. The analysis is based on three actantial narrative macro schemas inspired by the semiotic analysis of dramatic works and mainly on the actantial narrative model elaborated by Anne Ubersfeld (1989) in order to analyze dramatic texts. The years that define this study are noteworthy from a historical, social and political point of view. In September 1810 the Declaration of Independence took place and in March 1879 the War of the Pacific (between Chile, Peru and Bolivia) broke out and this resulted in great lifestyle changes within the Chilean society. The general aim of this study is thus to describe, analyze and contextualize a corpus of Chilean plays that were written between 1810 and 1879 with the specific idea of creating and cultivating a national literature that was Chilean and ‘post-independency’. At the same time the investigation shows how these dramatic texts imagine the new Nation and start a dialogue with the contemporary Chilean society. The analysis shows that the plays of the corpus are deeply rooted in the sociocultural, political and historical context in which contrary ideological standpoints of that time appear and contradict each other. Furthermore, it intends to answer to the ideological approaches made by certain Chilean intellectuals of the 19th century and especially to the speech that José Victorino Lastarria, gave in 1842 about how to conceive and establish a Chilean national literature. It seems obvious that the collective imagination of this new Chilean nation-state that was under formation and that was represented by a literary discourse that was mainly founded on a liberal ideology which was learned, republican and positivist. These ideas were seen as having a firm belief in education, liberty, democracy, as well as in reason, progress and modernity, although these ideas in themselves present concepts with several fissures and contradictions.