This study of the work of the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes argues that there is a fundamental paradox at the heart of Fuentes's vision of Mexico and in his role as novelist and critic in putting forth that vision. This paradox hinges on the tension between national identity and modernity. A significant internal conflict, van Delden contends, emerges in Fuentes's work from his attempt to stake out two different positions for himself, as experimental novelist and as politicallly engaged and responsible intellectual. Drawing on his fiction, literary essays and political journalism, the book places these tensions in Fuentes's work in relation to the larger debates about modernity and postmodernity in Latin America. It concludes that Fuentes is fundamentally a modernist writer, in spite of the fact that he occasionally gravitates toward the postmodernist position in literature and politics.