Introduction: The papier-mache parrot -- Writing aporia: aesthetics and politics in the dictator novel of the global South -- Tabula rasa: Juan Manuel de Rosas and the emergence of the dictator as a literary figure -- Fathers of the fatherlands: writing, politics, and literary form at the end of the Latin American "boom" -- Mesaventures: the politics and poetics of the dictator novel in the African postcolony -- The dictator in the corpolony: on the dictator novel in the time of transition -- Afterword: Moving outward and forward
