Carlos Eduardo Zavaleta (1928-2011) was a Peruvian writer, translator, essayist and chancellor, known mainly for his membership of the Generation of the 1950s. The most outstanding aspect of Zavaleta and the one most studied by critics has been his facet as a storyteller, especially as a short-story writer, in which he developed extensively throughout most of his life. However, his facet as an essayist has been little developed, and for this reason, this paper aims to review and periodise C. E. Zavaleta’s production of essays and articles in four main stages. The first, formative (1948-1952), in which he focused on reviewing and commenting on translations of foreign books. The second, the dissemination of foreign writers (1953-1973), in which his publications revolved around promoting the new techniques and style of North American and European writers; likewise, this stage also include...

Juan Leon Mera was a conservative and fervently Catholic Ecuadorian writer who lived in the mid-nineteenth century whose most famous novel was “Cumandá”. In this novel, although its sentimental and Indianist aspects are usually studied, Mera concretized his ideals of a state based on Catholicism. However, this article questions whether this proposal of Catholic organization is viable at the end of the book. In this sense, it is intended, on the one hand, to characterize the elements that make up the theocratic state project and, on the other hand, to demonstrate that the conformation of this Christian and at the same time conservative project, from what is proposed in Cumandá and its relationship with the socio-political context of the time, ends up being an unviable project. The reason for this unviability is initially due to the contradiction between Juan León Mera’s condition...