Vargas Llosa and Latin American politics / edited by Juan E. De Castro and Nicholas Birns.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

p.1. Mario Vargas Llosa and the neoliberal turn -- Mr. Vargas Llosa goes to Washington / Juan E. De Castro -- The wars of an old-fashioned (neoliberal) gentleman / Fabiola Escárzaga -- Let's make owners and entrepreneurs: glimpses of free marketeers in Vargas Llosa's novels / Jean O'Bryan Knight -- p.2. The writings of the 1980s and 1990s -- Appropriation in the backlands: is Mario Vargas Llosa at war with Euclides da Cunha? / Nicholas Birns -- Mario Vargas Llosa, the fabulist of queer cleansing / Paul Allatson -- Going native: anti-indigenism in Vargas Llosa's The storyteller and Death in the Andes / Ignacio López-Calvo -- The recovered childhood: utopian liberalism and mercantilism of the skin in A fish in the water / Sergio Franco -- p.3. Mario Vargas Llosa in the twenty-first century -- Sex, politics and high art: Vargas Llosa's long road to The feast of the goat / Gene H. Bell-Villada -- Humanism and criticism: The presence of French culture in Vargas Llosa's utopia / Roland Forgues -- p.4. Mario Vargas Llosa, man of letters -- Vargas Llosa's self-definition as 'the man who writes and thinks' / Sabine Köllmann -- Vargas Llosa and the history of ideas: avatars of a dictionary / Wilfrido H. Corral.

Written from diverse perspectives, the eleven essays that make up Vargas Llosa and Latin American Politics portray the Nobel Prize-winning Peruvian novelist not only as one of the most celebrated writers of the last 50 years, but also as a central influence on the region's political evolution. Ever since his conversion to free market ideology in the 1980s, Mario Vargas Llosa has waged public battle against what he believes are the scourges of socialism and populism. This book studies the fiction and journalism of Vargas Llosa in the context of his political thought.