Overview

The world-renowned Peruvian poet César Vallejo (1892-1938) was also a journalist, essayist, novelist and would-be dramatist. The study of his life and work has encountered problems since the 1950s, stemming from the fact that half of his writing was published posthumously under editorship of doubtful accuracy. The matter is further complicated in that his non-poetic work has been neglected in favour of his verse. A Struggle between Art and Politics reviews the evidence -- literary and historical -- now reliably to hand, and assesses the often conflicting body of opinion his work has generated. Three essential questions are pertinent: Where should Vallejo be placed in the canon of twentieth-century modernism? What effect did his mid-life conversion to Communism have on his writing? How should his prose fiction, journalism and essays be assessed in relation to his poetry? There are few writers whose literary output follows the twists and turns of their lives more closely than César Vallejo's. This new, comparative study maps his career onto the cultural, social, political and historical backdrop to his life in Peru, France, Spain and Russia, and analyses his writings in the light of his life circumstances. Vallejo's journey from Peru, the cultural ""periphery"", to the ""centre"" of inter-war Paris, his experience of European capitalism during the Depression, and the confrontation of Communism and Fascism, ultimately played out in the Spanish Civil War, forced him to wage a personal struggle to reconcile art with life and politics. This challenge is fought out in different ways in his various writings, but nowhere more movingly, passionately and humanely than in his posthumous poetry.

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9781845197865

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Reviews

Bob Brittons book brings Cesar Vallejo fascinatingly to life-illuminating both the key moments and the more intimate details. Britton interweaves the life and the creative drive of this extraordinary poet with such fresh insights that you return to Vallejos work with a renewed thirst. -- Adam Feinstein, Biographer & Translator of Pablo Neruda Complete with its own excellent translations of all material quoted from Vallejo (an achievement which deserves recognition in its own right: his translation of Trilce I is better than most), plus a judicious, non-partisan survey of scholarship on Vallejo, the book will stand as a fine, accessible guide to one of the twentieth centurys great poets. -- Adam Sharman, University of Nottingham

Author Information

R K Britton is an honorary research fellow in the Department of Hispanic Studies, Sheffield University, where he is also a part-time tutor in Spanish in The Institute of Lifelong Learning. His research interests are modern Latin American literature, the literature and culture of Golden Age Spain and literary translation. His The Poetic and Real Worlds of César Vallejo (18921938) was widely reviewed: Bob Britton's book brings César Vallejo fascinatingly to life, Adam Feinstein

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