El Revés de la Arpillera: Perfil Literario de Chile

Madrid: Hiperión, 1988. First Edition. Small octavo with white and red self-wraps; 275 pages; portrait; 20 cm Near fine with mild reading crease and sunning to spine. Paperback. ISBN: 9788475172064, 8475172067

In Spanish. A history of Chilean literature. "El reves de la arpillera no es un libro al uso. Concebido como una historia de la literature de Chile desde su constitucion como Estado independiente hasta hoy, rehuye sin embargo el caracter academico que suele acompanar proyectos simliares. Con un estilo que une la brillantez narrativa a una enorme erudicion, el autor traza en sus paginas un recorrido sistematico por una literatura a la que otorga presencia e identidad propias, sacandola de ese cajon de sastre llamado Literatura Hispanoamericana, donde toda manifestacion literaria nacional, desde el cono sur hasta Mexico, ha solido ser disuelta y neutralizada por el discurso academico dominante." ¶ Approaches Chile’s political memory through the underside of a textile metaphor, treating the “back of the burlap” as the hidden weave of trauma, testimony, and cultural resistance that official histories smooth over. In tightly argued, essayistic prose, Jara reads popular art, exile narratives, and post-coup silences as intertwined threads whose knots reveal the lived contradictions of dictatorship and diaspora. The study’s quiet force comes from its insistence that cultural artifacts—humble or grand—carry a counter-history in their seams, and that understanding Chile’s fractured past demands turning the fabric over to expose the rough, unvarnished patterns that sustained collective identity when formal discourse could not.