SOURCE: Kerr, Lucille. “Conventions of Authorial Design: José Donoso's Casa de campo.” Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literature 42, no. 2 (summer 1988): 133-52.

In the following essay, Kerr analyzes the metafictional elements of Casa de campo.

In José Donoso's Casa de Campo the conventions of reading mimetic fiction confront the conventions of reading reflexive writing. The novel juxtaposes and turns between at least two apparently distinct modes of discourse, two seemingly disparate ways of reading and writing narrative fiction. The fictions proposed by Casa de campo take us from a reading of the novel as a reflexive commentary on the state of things in modern fiction to a reading of its fiction as both a nineteenth-century family story and a political allegory. Within its pages Donoso's novel also produces the image of an author who is master over the text in which he himself appears but who can also...