Diego Barros Arana and the Historia Jeneral de Chile
Matyoka, Gertrude Mary
Matyoka, Gertrude Mary
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Date
1972
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Abstract
Because Barros Arana interpreted the Chilean past according to the times in which he lived, his Historia Jeneral de Chile becomes a cultural indicator of Chilean society during the second half of the nineteenth century. Rather than divorcing himself and his attitudes from his writing, Barros Arana included the biases and prejudices of his generation in the Historia Jeneral. The atmosphere in the Barros Arana household combined aristocratic elegance with bourgeois sensibility and formed in the historian the basic value system to which he adhered throughout his life. But like most people the pressures and ideals of his own generation somewhat modified his values and made Barros Arana a moderate liberal. In his adult life he adhered to two philosophical schools that reflected this duality, Positivism and Voltaireanism. To write the Historia Jeneral Barros Arana employed the methodology of scientific history introduced into Chile by Andres Bello and the theory of evolutionary development to explain the essence of liberalism in his country. Hence h demonstrated that liberty was ancient in the Spanish heritage and stressed the institutional development of republican government in Chile. Too, he manifested his beliefs in depicting national virtues and gave to his heroes and the basic ethnic stock essentially middle class characteristics. Yet Barros Arana, a moderate man, became rabid in his attacks on the church due to his strong anticlericalism. In the Historia Jeneral Barros Arana created a liberal interpretation of the Chilean past that the majority of his contemporaries could identify with because his liberalism was tempered either by his pelucon heritage of his adherence to Positivism, or both. By writing essentially a centrist interpretation of the national past, Barros Arana insured the continued acceptance of the ideas he projected in the Historia Jeneral de Chile, among the liberal aristocratic community.
Contents
Subject
Subject(s)
Barros Arana, Diego, 1830-1907
Chile--History--Historiography
Chile--History--Historiography
Research Projects
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Genre
Dissertation
Description
Format
v, 265 leaves, bound
Department
History