Literary Lima represented in the short stories of Julio Ramón Ribeyro

Abstract

In this essay I explore the literary representations that Julio Ramón Ribeyro produced to capture aesthetically the political, social and cultural dynamics of their growing and modernizing capital, Lima. Reading works of fiction, I map out how the concept and imaginary of Lima were changing during the 1960s and 1970s. I pay close attention to the various tropes mobilized to represent the space and time that became characteristic of a city that was decreasingly socially and racially homogeneous and isolated on the global economic and political stage. Increasingly complex, Lima's literary representations contained the multifarious contradictions that were also predominantly apparent in the city's material history, a city whose habitable space and narratable time were being produced anew everyday. I argue that resorting to mythic allusions and nostalgic gestures, Ribeyro represented this multiple city, his own literary Lima.