Abstract

Whether icebound or dry cracked plains, the imaginaries that these natural frontiers tend to elicit revolve around vast emptiness, and Chile’s literary and cultural imaginary has been set up between these two deserts, north and south. We may appreciate these imaginaries eloquently in literary productions and in visual arts, in a process that moves from the natural to the cultural (Sagredo 2014). But to speak of Chile’s deserts is not only to think of a bioregion in the geographical sense; it is also to speak of multiple spaces and overlapping layers: economic, political, cultural, and environmental. Likewise, there are various lenses through which a selection of works and authors can be summoned to explore and describe the diverse stories that the desert prompts.