The Labor of Literature: Democracy and Literary Culture in Modern Chile.

• Author: McSherry, J. Patrice
• Position: LATIN AMERICA - Book review

Griffin, Jane D. The Labor of Literature: Democracy and Literary Culture in Modern Chile. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016.

In this absorbing book, Jane D. Griffin examines the impact of the Pinochet dictatorship on culture in Chile and the ways artists and writers resisted and protested by semi-clandestinely creating new forms of literature. The regime, which took power in a 1973 coup, imposed militarism, Catholicism, patriarchy, and free market capitalism in Chile. It radically altered society, using violence and terror to erase the cultural and political transformations that had taken place in the 1960s and early 1970s under the presidencies of Frei and especially Allende. Soldiers burned books in the street and the dictatorship abruptly halted the mass distribution of literature that had flourished under Allende. The book was considered a threat to national security. The "military...