Dictator novel
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The dictator novel (Template:Lang-es) is a genre of Latin American literature that challenges the role of the dictator in Latin American society. The theme of caudillismo—the régime of a charismatic caudillo, a political strongman—is addressed by examining the relationships between power, dictatorship, and writing. Moreover, a dictator novel often is an allegory for the role of the writer in a Latin American society. Although mostly associated with the Latin American Boom of the 1960s and 1970s, the dictator-novel genre has its roots in the nineteenth-century novel Facundo (1845), by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento. As an indirect critique of Juan Manuel de Rosas's dictatorial régime in Argentina, Facundo is the forerunner of the dictator novel genre; all subsequent dictator novels hearken back to it. As established by Sarmiento, the goal of the genre is not to analyze the rule of particular dictators, or to focus on historical accuracy, but to examine the abstract nature of authority figures and of authority in general.
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