Recovering Democracy examines the problem of individual and societal recovery in several key Chilean novels and films from the period of 1987–2006, in the final years and aftermath of the Pinochet dictatorship. The time period is critical to understanding modern Chilean art and politics, since it straddles the reawakening of the Chilean cultural scene, accompanied by large-scale civil resistance to the military regime and the complicated return to a democracy marked and often hindered by militarism and the transition to neo-liberalism. An official policy of forgetting severely hamstrung genuine recovery by eliding the continued tensions and contradictions in favor of a false consensus, which many writers and filmmakers confronted with a new, more inclusive vision of national community, incorporating the disenfranchised into the so-called "Chilean Miracle."

The project explores the problem of several types of recovery in fiction and cinema: physical, social, and democratic recovery; the re-purposing of urban industrial waste; the adaptation to new postdictatorial political and economic realities; recovery as salvage or recycling of the past—even popular insurrection as recovery. It also incorporates discussion of many issues broached by post-dictatorship studies of Chile, building on existing criticism, which focuses largely on issues of mourning, along with cultural and aesthetic problems of the official transition to democracy, and more recently on memory work, which has centered around the partisan struggles to forge historical memory. In addition to addressing existing scholarship, the individual chapters integrate new work on avant-garde fiction and art, hyperrealism, the neobaroque, melodrama, documentary cinema, and detective fiction in order to illuminate a highly complex and fragmented artistic scene. The primary authors and filmmakers discussed are the following: Diamela Eltit, Pedro Lemebel, Antonio Skármeta, Ricardo Larraín, Andrés Wood, Raúl Ruiz, Patricio Guzmán, Ramón Díaz Eterovic, Alberto Fuguet, and Roberto Bolaño.