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.

This book investigates the use of Late Antique European history (roughly, the fall of Rome and the establishment of barbarian kingdoms) by late medieval and Renaissance writers such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Davenant, Trissino, and Corneille. Barbarian memory in this era was seen as at once a rousing evocation of ethnic origin and an embarrassing reminder of an era of disruptive invasions and strange, uncouth names within a European fabric that desired to see itself as seamless. We see the stories of Goths, Vandals, and Lombards crop up from Spain to Sweden, from major texts like Hamlet and Don Quixote to virtually unread works such as Corneille's Pertharite or Davenant's Gondibert. The issues of ethnicity and religion raised by the barbarian era makes its representation very different from that of the classical world, and makes the book an investigation not just of this particular topic but how time and history conceived in the early modern period.

Mario Vargas Llosa is a heterogeneous writer whose positions have often not been consistent from novel to novel, between his fictional and nonfictional work, between his literary and political commentary, and as his political commentary has proceeded over the decades. This analysis of his work reveals his insights into socio-political matters.