Book contents
- A History of Chilean Literature
- A History of Chilean Literature
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Proto-Chilean, Colonial Chronicles and Letters
- Chapter 1 The Evolving Image of the Araucanía and Its Conquistadors in Valdivia’s Cartas de Relación and Vivar’s Crónica y relación copiosa y verdadera de los reinos de Chile
- Chapter 2 Alonso de Ercilla’s La Araucana and Pedro de Oña’s Arauco domado in the National Imaginary
- Chapter 3 Writing while Walking: Alonso Ovalle and the Construction of the World’s End Narrative in An Historical Relation of the Kingdom of Chile (1646)
- Chapter 4 Empathy with the Mapuche
- Chapter 5 Subalterns Find Their Voice
- Part II Nineteenth-Century Articulations of an Embryonic National Consciousness
- Part III Beyond Chileanness: Heterogeneity and Transculturation in Canonical and Peripheral Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Literature
- Index
- References
Chapter 3 - Writing while Walking: Alonso Ovalle and the Construction of the World’s End Narrative in An Historical Relation of the Kingdom of Chile (1646)
from Part I - Proto-Chilean, Colonial Chronicles and Letters
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 September 2021
- A History of Chilean Literature
- A History of Chilean Literature
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Proto-Chilean, Colonial Chronicles and Letters
- Chapter 1 The Evolving Image of the Araucanía and Its Conquistadors in Valdivia’s Cartas de Relación and Vivar’s Crónica y relación copiosa y verdadera de los reinos de Chile
- Chapter 2 Alonso de Ercilla’s La Araucana and Pedro de Oña’s Arauco domado in the National Imaginary
- Chapter 3 Writing while Walking: Alonso Ovalle and the Construction of the World’s End Narrative in An Historical Relation of the Kingdom of Chile (1646)
- Chapter 4 Empathy with the Mapuche
- Chapter 5 Subalterns Find Their Voice
- Part II Nineteenth-Century Articulations of an Embryonic National Consciousness
- Part III Beyond Chileanness: Heterogeneity and Transculturation in Canonical and Peripheral Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Literature
- Index
- References
Summary
In his book The Picture of Dorian Gray, published in 1890, the Irish writer Oscar Wilde cited a text by an unknown Jesuit or, rather, what that Jesuit had heard, when he referred to the “flutes of human bones” (114) made by certain indigenous people after they defeated Spanish soldiers on the southern border of the Viceroyalty of Peru. This was a sort of cannibalism, but which ended with musical performance and ritual consummation.1 The most likely explanation is that Wilde had read a curious partial translation into English from 1703 of a book written by the Chilean Jesuit Alonso de Ovalle (1603–1651) that was published in Rome in 1646.
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- Information
- A History of Chilean Literature , pp. 61 - 77Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021