What About Realism? Alberto Blest Gana, Georg Lukács, and Their Chilean Readers

Abstract

In this article, I analyse Georg Lukács’s theories of realism in relation to Alberto Blest Gana’s work. For this purpose, I explore two essays that have greatly contributed to locating the Chilean author’s novels within the realm of literary realism. The texts chosen for my study are Jaime Concha’s prologue to the Martín Rivas edition by the Ayacucho Library and Ricardo A. Latcham’s essay “Blest Gana y la novela realista” [Blest Gana and the Realist Novel]. Concha and Latcham find appropriate categories for the interpretation of Blest Gana’s work in Lukács’s essays. In their readings, they accurately apply notions such as the selective principle or the typology of characters. However, while using those insights as a shared critical platform, they arrive at different interpretations of what is meant by realism. The article elucidates the role played by Concha and Latcham in the Chilean intellectual field and shows how literary genealogies inform their critical projects.