Peruvian narrative has undergone a dynamic resurgence since the early 1990s, after the predominance in the 1980s of the short story and of poetry (especially by female writers), with the exception of the continuing novelistic projects of Mario Vargas Llosa and Alfredo Bryce Echenique (writing predominantly from outside Peru). Within this dynamic resurgence, which solicits urgent critical analysis, the bipolar, oppositional stances of Jaime Bayly (talk-show host and leading exponent ofliteratura light) and Iván Thays (university lecturer, literary critic and advocate ofnarrativa culta) stand out as leading alternatives, or as part of what will be understood in this...

Gay/lesbian literary studies and queer theory now hold an increasingly visible position in humanities departments in British and US universities and in English/French critical theory. In the USA and UK, queer theory has branched off from gay and lesbian studies; the move to queer represents a theoretical shift linked to the socio-political. It is possible to analyse in Foucauldian terms the historical shifts in identity (self-)categorization from homosexual to gay/lesbian and then to queer. ‘Gay’ was a term appropriated in the late 1960s in order to represent a positive social identity in contrast with ‘homosexual’ as a form of behaviour...

Jaime Bayly’s seven novels published to date are first-person narratives that display an agile control of language (with an emphasis on oral characteristics) and reflect what one critic has termed ‘el pulso de su tiempo’.¹ The aim of this chapter is to discuss this narrative style within the theoretical framework of US/Latin American/Peruvian postmodern debates and in the broader context of Bayly’s work as a whole (television, self-marketing, profile in Lima), as well as Peruvian socio-political concerns. A consideration of postmodernism as a period or movement is immediately problematic in the case of Bayly/Peru – especially if it is defined...

Iván Thays is the most prominent and successful alternative to the mass cultural marketing of Jaime Bayly of the more than twenty novelists to have emerged on to the Peruvian literary scene since the early 1990s. It is the aim of this chapter to study Thays’ three novels published to date –Escena de caza, El viaje interior, La disciplina de la vanidad– in terms of the three ways in which they have played an active part in the regeneration of Peruvian narrative since the late 1990s: (1) their oppositional response within Peruvian culture and postmodern narrative to the...

In Chapter 3, Iván Thays was introduced as the most successful and prominent Peruvian alternative to the mass cultural marketing of Jaime Bayly since the mid-1990s, and it was argued that Thays’ central exploration of the relationship between history and literature focuses on the idea that narrative can build on and challenge versions of social, political and cultural events and ‘facts’: ‘narrar es suplantar […] es hacer paréntesis ahí donde no hay un texto oficial’.¹ With the publication ofLos años inútilesin 2002, Jorge Eduardo Benavides challenges Thays’ prominence and success (especially outside Peru) and offers an aesthetically challenging...

Throughout this book I have argued that Bayly’s narrative is more interesting than most critics have suggested in terms of writing sexual identities and that three of his novels can be interestingly engaged with queer theory.¹ Critics have repeatedly dismissed Bayly as ‘low’ culture or mere entertainment. Though the narratives of both Bayly and Benavides aim to break down divisions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, criticism of Bayly’s work – such as that by Thays – is shown to be ideologically motivated and often misinformed. This ties in with Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of a ‘pure’ and ‘popular’ aesthetic and of...