Images of Otherness in the Chilean Exile Literature. A Pretext: Isabel Allende’s ‘Daughter of Fortune’
Images of Otherness in the Chilean Exile Literature. A Pretext: Isabel Allende’s ‘Daughter of Fortune’

Summary/Abstract: Dealing with the literary theme of Otherness in the contemporary Latin American literature, the study focuses on one of the Chilean novelist Isabel Allende’s books, Daughter of Fortune (1999). The author is here obviously interested in projecting her narrative discourse on a net of cultural hybridizations and complex identities, very different at the ethnic, national, racial or social level. That is why the image of the Otherness works both ways: for each identity (represented by a group or just by an individual) the Other is the Stranger. Allende uses her own personal cross-cultural history in order to give shape to a world which functions through oppositions and hierarchies. The heroine of the novel, somehow a marginal because of her gender, ambiguous origin and social status, performs a voyage between the two symbolical spaces (Valparaiso and California), travel which eventually becomes a quest for her own identity. The book is abundant in literary clichés, especially regarding the representations of the Other

• Details
• Contents