Abstract
Lima is doubtlessly the most recurrent site of Mario Vargas Llosa’s novels, even though he spent most of his life in other locations. His choosing of Lima as a topic is an acknowledgment of the centralist role the city plays in the history of Peru, but it entails as well Vargas Llosa’s symbolic intuition that representing that centrality is not a way to reaffirm it but a way to subvert it and to look at its underside. This article traces the presence of Lima in Vargas Llosa’s fiction on two different levels – Lima as a place and a function in the national circuit of internal social, cultural, and political dynamics in Peru and Lima as an urban labyrinth of inner power relations, radically opposed to the well-known center/margin (or inside/outside) power relation put forwards by Uruguayan critic and literary theorist Ángel Rama in his seminal book The Lettered City (which, ironically enough, was originally published with a prologue by Vargas Llosa).
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities. New York: Verso.
Benjamin, Walter. 2019. Illuminations. London: Mariner Books.
Castro-Klarén, Sara. 1990. Understanding Mario Vargas Llosa. Columbia: University of South Carolina.
Derrida, Jacques. 2000. Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences. In Modern Criticism and Theory. A Reader, ed. David Lodge. Singapore: Pearson Education.
Elmore, Peter. Los muros invisibles. Lima: Pontifica Universidad Católica del Perú.
Fernández Retamar, Roberto. 1971. Sobre cultura y revolución en la América Latina. Revista Casa de las Américas 68.
Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP.
Lukács, Grÿgorÿ. 1981. The Historical Novel. New York: Penguin.
Mar, Matos, and José. 1984. Desborde popular y crisis del estado. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos.
Oviedo, José Miguel. 1982. Mario Vargas Llosa: la invención de una realidad. Barcelona: Seix Barral.
———. 2001. Historia de la literatura hispanoamericana. 4. De Borges al presente. Madrid: Alianza Universidad.
Rama, Ángel. 2001. La ciudad letrada. San Juan: Ediciones del Norte.
Sommer, Doris. 1991. Foundational Fictions. The National Romances of Latin America. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Vargas Llosa, Mario. 1963. The Time of the Hero (1986). New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux.
———. 1966. The Green House (2005). New York: Harper Collins.
———. 1967. The Cubs and Other Stories (1989). New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux.
———. 1969. Conversation in the Cathedral (1975). New York: Harper & Row.
———. 1973. Captain Pantoja and the Special Service (1978). New York: Harper & Row.
———. 1977. Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1982). Farrar, Straus, Giroux.
———. 1987. The Storyteller (2001). London: Picador.
———. 1993. A Fish in the Water (1994). New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux.
———. 2006. The Bad Girl (2008). London: Picador.
———. 2015. Notes on the Death of Culture. In Essays on Spectacle and Society. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux.
Williams, Raymond. 1954. Film and the Dramatic Tradition. In Preface to Film, ed. Williams and Michael Orrom. London: Film Drama Limited.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this entry
Cite this entry
Faverón Patriau, G. (2021). Lima and Mario Vargas Llosa. In: Tambling, J. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62592-8_247-1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62592-8_247-1
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-62592-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-62592-8
eBook Packages: Springer Reference Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Humanities