LOS TRASPLANTADOS OR ALBERTO BLEST GANA'S TRAVELLER REALISM

This article shows the values that the aesthetics of realism acquires in Los trasplantados (1904), a novel written by Alberto Blest Gana during his last years. Initially, we briefly describe the first displacement of this aesthetic, i.e., its incarnation as a national novel in a text such as Martin Rivas (1862), written and published in Chile and for Chileans. Instead, Los trasplantados is a novel written and published in Paris, after thirty years of voluntary exile. Although formally similar to that use of realism made by the national novel, in Los trasplantados this aesthetics acquires a completely different meaning. The particularization of practices that in Martin Rivas defined some supposedly aristocratic subjects, the Chilean oligarchy, here serves to define rastacueros, a group degraded in comparison with European aristocracy. Those findings are briefly discussed.