The Fox from Up Above and the Fox from Down Below

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University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000 - 326 pages
The last novel by Peruvian writer Jose Maria Arguedas, set in the booming port city of Chimbote, is an expression of the human costs of rapid modernization. Tragically, the malaise of the society is reflected in the literal self-destruction of the author, a process chronicled in four diaries woven into the novel itself. Arguedas lost his struggle with suicide as he neared the end of the novel and shot himself to death, closing his own life but deliberately leaving his novel open. Fittingly, the forces of destruction in this rich and fascinating work are wondrously transformed by language and emotion, by faith and redemption. As with the other volumes in the Pittsburgh Editions of Latin American Literature, The Fox From Up Above and the Fox From Down Below contains critical essays providing background and analyses of the text for classroom use.

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Contents

First Diary I
9
II
11
Second Diary III IV Third Diary 9 56 27 56
83
Copyright

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About the author (2000)

Jose Arguedas was an ethnologist and teacher and the product of a rural Peruvian world in which Indian and white were inextricably mingled yet lived separately, with disastrous psychological results for both. In his prose he created a fusion of the two worlds, which is at the same time a disguised symbolic autobiography, using language that combined elements of Spanish and Quechua syntax in an effort to express this complex reality. He was the son of a rural judge and lawyer. The problems created by a disrupted and difficult childhood were exacerbated by the cultural tensions of his society. In 1969 Arguedas ended his life by committing suicide. Julio Ortega is a professor of Hispanic Studies at Brown University.

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