Arguedas: Los Rios Profundos

Front Cover
Bloomsbury Academic, 1997 - Foreign Language Study - 250 pages

This Spanish text is useful for teaching Peruvian, Latin American literature and cultural history at university level. It could also be read at upper sixth-form level as the plot is uncomplicated and the emotional atmosphere is immediately graspable. It tells the story of a young man's experience of growing up in highland Peru in a deeply divided society and of his struggle to overcome conflicts of language and culture. He manages to elaborate an alternative vision of Peru, drawing above all on native Indian sensibility and traditions. In the process, the novel draws on key elements of Peruvian history and culture and above all on popular memory. The introduction outlines the main features of the plot and offers a clear interpretation of the major episodes, relating them to key features of modern Peru and explains the chief elements of native culture that figure in the text, such as the use of myth.

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About the author (1997)

William Rowe is Anniversary Professor of Poetics, Department of Iberian and Latin American Studies, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK. He lived and taught in Peru in the 1960s, and has since been visiting Professor at universities there and in Mexico. He is the author of Memory and Modernity: Popular Culture in Latin America (1991), and Poets of Contemporary Latin America (2000).

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