First Chilean Female Writers and the authorization of the literary craft

Abstract

With the beginning of the twentieth century, several female authors of aristocratic origin try to write, from an autobiographical perspective, a new version of the history of the nineteenth-century national project. Their speech tries to organize a cultural and social genealogy that defines female writers from a strong androcentric perspective. This point of view goes from the assertion of an emerging social and cultural heritage of the Enlightenment project of emancipation to a rejection to these same structures, from an emerging feminist awareness. Considering some of their writings about their own work, I analyze the relationship these writers establish with a particular social class, gender and associated images to the category of woman-writer, in comparison to the modern national project in Chile.