La metamorfosis de la ciudad literaria: tradición y ruptura en La ciudad muerta de Abraham Valdelomar

Abstract

In his novella La ciudad muerta (1991), the Peruvian writer, Abraham Valdelomar (1888-1919), breaks with the traditional perception of Lima as a “Colonial Arcadia”. The author follows the modernist Latin American tradition and rewrites the European topic of the “dead city”, thus creating an innovative bohemian and decaying image of the Peruvian capital. Moreover, the urban space turns into an uncanny territory that enters a world of fantasy. The spatial and temporal barriers are distorted until the modern city and the colonial city merge in a phantasmagorical and mysterious universe which stands as a symbolic answer to the transformations that Lima suffered upon the arrival of modernity.