Alegoria y nacion en la novela peruana del siglo XX: Vallejo, Alegria, Arguedas, Vargas Llosa, Gutierrez

This dissertation examines the ways in which the relations between the individual and the collectivity within the frame of the nation are portrayed throughout the Twentieth Century Peruvian novel. The novels included in this investigation are Cesar Vallejo's El tungsteno (1931), Ciro Alegria's El mundo es ancho y ajeno (1941), Jose Maria Arguedas' El Sexto (1961), Mario Vargas Llosa's Conversacion en La Catedral (1969) and Miguel Gutierrez's La violencia del tiempo (1991). The purpose of this dissertation is to situate the texts in their socio-historical context and, while dialoguing with other discourses that address similar concerns, to show how the social realistic and political tenor of these novels open up a figural dimension that adds a new meaning which supersedes their original intention. I resort to allegory, a trope that has been a key factor in recent theorizations about the status of Latin American cultural production.;The first chapter includes a summary of the main theoretical concepts used and each of the following chapters is dedicated to analyzing at length all of the aforementioned novels. Chapter two is devoted to El tungsteno , specifically the allegorical implication of spatiality and the allegorical portrayal of the main characters of the novel. The third chapter reads El mundo es ancho y ajeno as a populist allegory and uses as a background the emergence of the mestizo figure as a carrier of a messianic and modernizer discourse. The following chapter interprets El Sexto as a political allegory and resorts to the "utopia andina" to understand the text's underlying mythical subtext. Chapter five examines Vargas Llosa's novel in terms of the dynamic between the private and public sphere and pays particular attention to the confession mode in which the narration is encoded. The final chapter provides a reading of La violencia del tiempo, which takes into account both the portrayal of the Peruvian mestizo family since Independence to modern times and a series of parallel stories that illustrate the prevalence of popular struggles around the world.