“LA FAMILIA QUE ESCOGÍ”: A PANORAMA OF FAMILY REPRESENTATIONS IN RECENT CHILEAN NARRATIVE AND THEIR LINKS TO THE NATIONAL LITERARY TRADITION

Abstract

The family and its representation in fiction have evolved from the twentieth to the twenty-first century. In
Chilean narrative, the traditional Western family model, socially imposed (father, mother, children), has been transgressed in multiple ways, both in the twentieth century, through controversial family descriptions in a
given context, and in the twenty-first century, where diverse views of family structures have been strengthened.
This article proposes to identify a panorama of representations of family that diverge from traditional models
in chosen canonical novels of the twentieth century, as well as in narrative works from the first decade of the twenty-first century. In these texts, we observe a transition from controversial family descriptions to a recognized diversity of families. It first explores representations of families distant from the traditional model in
national canon novels of the twentieth century. Then, connections between fictional representations of families
from the twentieth century transitioning to the twenty-first are explored, which also allows for discovering a textual relationship between narrative works of both centuries. And lastly, three perspectives are presented as
axes of analysis to review family models in the narrative of the early twenty-first century.