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Expressions Of National Crisis: Diamela Eltit's E. Luminata And Pablo Picasso's Guernica , Gisela Norat

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Diamela Eltit emerged as a writer during the 1980s when Chile was ruled by the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet (1973 -1989). The obscurity of her first book, Lumpérica (trans. E. Luminata) reflects that period of national repression. Despite the negligible attention she received for her first novel, Eltit has since published six other novels and managed to carve out a place for herself within Chile's predominantly male literary establishment. Her writing challenges its mainstream cultural apparatus with a female-centered postmodern writing very different from that of compatriots like best selling authors Isabel Allende in the United States …