Wow! eBook
Reforming Chile: Cultural Politics, Nationalism, and the Rise of the Middle Class New Edition
Author(s): Patrick M. Barr-Melej (Author)
- Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
- Publication Date: 30 May 2001
- Edition: New
- Language: English
- Print length: 312 pages
- ISBN-10: 0807826049
- ISBN-13: 9780807826041
Book Description
A new framework for understanding Chile’s cultural and political modernization Highlighting the crucial yet largely overlooked role played by society’s middle layers in the historical development of Latin America, Patrick Barr-Melej provides the first comprehensive analysis of the rise of Chile’s middle-class reform movement and its profound impact on that country’s cultural and political landscapes. He shows how a diverse collection of middle-class intellectuals, writers, politicians, educators, and bureaucrats forged a “progressive” nationalism and advanced an ambitious cultural-political project between the 1890s and 1940s. Together, reformers challenged the power of elite groups and sought to quell working-class revolutionary activism as they endeavored to democratize culture and fortify liberal democracy. Using sources that range from archival documents and newspapers to short stories, novels, and school textbooks, Barr-Melej examines the reform movement’s cultural ideas and their political applications, especially as they were articulated in the areas of literature and public education. In the process, he provides a new framework for understanding Chile’s cultural and political evolution, as well as the complicated place of the middle class in a society experiencing the swift changes inherent in capitalist modernization.
Editorial Reviews
Review
“An extremely interesting new angle on somewhat neglected period of Chilean history….Future scholars crossing this terrain will be absolutely obliged to take Barr-Melej’s findings into account.” – Simon Collier, Vanderbilt University”
