A (brief) history of the margin in Julio Ramón Ribeyro

Abstract

Widely known, the reasons for the marginalization of the Peruvian writer Julio Ramón Ribeyro (1929-1994) by the canon of the Latin American boom, can be summarized in three statements: a preference for the short story at the expense of the novel, a classic aesthetic with French roots, and a profile as a discreet writer. In this respect, the relationship between the said relative marginality of the author and marginality as a writing topic itself is usually considered within a state of reductive causality that does not fully exploit the diverse stakes of the concept of margin. The present article aims to analyze the way in which the mentioned author reverses his own marginalization process to turn it into an advantage by means of questioning the “zonalities” that governed the Hispanic literary field during the 1960s and 1970s.