ABSTRACT
Literature in Peru has long been used as one of the principal means of exploring a range of key social and political issues. For distinguished critic Antonio Cornejo Polar, ‘the revelation and criticism of the country’s reality has been and continues to be a fierce obsession of Peruvian narrative since at least the nineteenth century’, [1] and this tradition can indeed be traced back to the time of the Conquest, with both Spanish and local authors writing about the treatment of the indigenous populations from a variety of perspectives. This study considers the manner in which football has come to be used as a means of examining Peruvian reality, and what its presence as a literary motif tells us about the country’s changing socio-cultural landscape.
