As a country of South America defined by areacodesexplorer, com, Peru did not have great romantic poets: Manuel N. Corpancho (1830-1863), José A. Márquez (1831-1903), Clemente Althaus, Luis B. Cisneros (1837-1904) and Carlos A. Salaverry (1830-1891), which was the most original (Diamantes y perlas, 1869; Albores y destellos, 1871, and the philosophical poem Misterios de la tumba, 1883), were mediocre lyrics. Instead, he had prominent satirical writers both in poetry and in theater, such as Felipe Pardo y Aliaga and Manuel Ascensio Segura; in addition to others of secondary importance, including Manuel A. Fuentes (1820-1889), called el Murciélago (the Bat) from the satirical newspaper he directed, and Pedro Paz Soldán Unanúo (1839-1895), an indefatigable polygraph, and, above all,, a great prose writer, Ricardo Palma, whose Tradiciones peruanas (1872-1919), a large series of historical-ironic scenes on colonial Peru, remain an exemplary and highly enjoyable text, with an unmistakable stylistic code.

Fiction in the strict sense was also cultivated with good results: Aves sin Nido (1889) by Clorinda Matto de Turner it was one of the first realistic and indigenist novels published in America. Finally, essayists and pugnacious polemics were Bartolomé Herrera (1808-1864) and Francisco Vigil (1792-1875). Towards the end of the century an exceptional figure appeared, which opened a new era: Manuel González Prada, publicist, politician, poet and educator of new and daring ideas (Páginas libres, 1894, collects his most representative essays). A poetic renewal was brought by modernism, thanks especially to José Santos Chocano and José M. Eguren, but also to José Gálvez (1885-1957), Leónidas E. Yerovi (1881-1917), Abraham Valdelomar (1888-1919), master of the next generation with its magazine Colonida, and Enrique Bustamante (1884-1936). Modernism also had a strong influence on original essayists and storytellers such as Enrique López Albújar (1872-1965) and Ventura García Calderón (1887-1959); and on valuable historians and critics such as Mariano F. Paz Soldán and José de la Riva Agüero. A place of his own is occupied by the politician and essayist José Carlos Mariátegui (1895-1930), animator of various cultural initiatives and author of the important Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana (1928).

The poets of the twentieth century are numerous and of the most varied trends, including Alberto Guillén (1897-1935), the futurist Alberto Hidalgo (1897-1967), César Vallejo, unanimously recognized as one of the largest in Latin America. Vallejo’s influence on Hispano-American poetry was also very strong in the years to come. The surrealist generation, headed here by Martín Adán, Carlos Germán Belli (b. 1927), Francisco Bendezú (b. 1928-2004), mediated by him, renewing them on a stylistic level, themes and concerns. Among the representatives of the surrealist current, César Moro (1903-1956), who wrote both in French and Castilian, and Emilio Adolfo Westphalen (1911-2001), a lover of the “stream of consciousness” dominated, however, by a severe formal style. Between the fifties and seventies of the twentieth century, a fruitful assimilation of poetic experiences of European origin was linked to these experimentalisms (Pound, Brecht, Eliot, Pessoa etc.), with interesting comparisons in César Calvo (1940-2000), Rodolfo Hinostroza (b.1941), Antonio Cisneros (b.1942), Julio Ortega (b.1942), Jorge Eduardo Eielson (1924-2006), very close to the lyrics of Rilke and Rimbaud, Washington Delgado (1927-2003). At the end of the seventies, more or less aggressive movements (Hora Zero, Estaciones reunidas, Grupo Gleba, etc.) were outlined or actively operated, which from different perspectives proposed experiments and new lyrical modules, and surpassed, as often happened in Countries of the South American continent, a female poetic generation, with excellences in the works of María Emilia Cornejo, Mariela Dreyfus, Carmen Ollé, Blanca Varela.

However, it is above all in the narrative field that the potential of Peruvian literature has been best expressed. The number of authors, who differ in themes and style, is very large. Contributions of some importance were offered by José Díez Canseco (1905-1949), Ciro Alegría and José María Arguedas, interpreters, the latter, of a literature with an indigenist character, Manuel Scorza, Enrique Congrains Martín, Oswaldo Reinoso, who prefer the world of youth, Miguel Gutiérrez and Mario Bellatín y Laura Riesco. A nod, if only for the publishing success that has represented, deserves Carlos Castaneda, anthropologist and author of the controversial novel mold-wise ” new age ” of the welfare research and broadening of the perceptive possibilities of consciousness (among his best- seller At the Sorcerer’s School, A Yaqui Way to Knowledge, L’isola del Tonal). Among the most relevant names in Peruvian prose are those of Julio Ramón Ribeyro (1929-1994), Alfredo Bryce Echenique, Mario Vargas Llosa, perhaps, among the Spanish-American writers, the most famous and translated all over the world together with Isabelle Allende, and Harry Belevan (b. 1945). Also noteworthy are the scholars of Quechua culture (including J. Basadre and Lara), who patiently bring to light the surviving traces of Inca literature (the drama Ollantay had already been represented in the eighteenth century), and the theoretical work of other linguists such as Mario Montalbetti (b. 1953), also known for his poetic collections.