Spain in the Making and Reception of García Márquez’s Works

2021 ◽  
pp. 291-320
Author(s):  
Álvaro Santana-Acuña
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Book Industry ◽  
Gabriel Garcia Marquez ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
American Novel ◽  
Literary Education ◽  
History Of ◽  
Democratic Rule ◽  
Analytical Tools ◽  
Iconic Figure

Gabriel García Márquez is one of the most beloved and read writers of the last century in Spain. Yet his early literary works went almost unnoticed for more than a decade among Spanish publishers, critics, and readers. The success of One Hundred Years of Solitude and subsequent works transformed him into a popular bestselling writer and iconic figure in that country. Using little-known and new sources, including documents from contemporary reviews and readers’ reactions as well as the author’s archives, this article studies the reception of García Márquez’s works and his rise to stardom in Spain. Key to the successful response to his oeuvre were (1) the literary education of the author, which allowed him to develop a writing style with appeal to Spanish audiences; (2) the diffusion and consecration of the New Latin American Novel (aka Boom novel) during a crisis in Peninsular fiction; (3) the modernization of Spain’s book industry, which benefited the promotion of García Márquez’s works among the rising middle classes; and (4) the writer’s involvement in the country’s cultural and political affairs during its transition to and consolidation of democratic rule. The intersection of these threads resulted in the appropriation of García Márquez as a Spanish writer and his transformation into one of Spain’s cultural icons. This article builds on analytical tools developed by the fields of cultural sociology and the history of reading practices.

Carlos Fuentes's Readings on Literary Traditions: From the New to the Great Latin American Novel

PMLA ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 128 (3) ◽  
pp. 698-701
Author(s):  
Anadeli Bencomo
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Gabriel Garcia Marquez ◽  
Mario Vargas Llosa ◽  
Juan Rulfo ◽  
American Novel ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Latin American Narrative ◽  
Nueva Novela ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Narrative Forms

Carlos Fuentes, like many other writers of the Boom, discussed his peers' unprecedented renovation of Latin American narrative forms—specifically, the novel (e.g., Donoso; Vargas Llosa). In La nueva novela hispanoamericana (1969; “The New Spanish American Novel”), Fuentes reviews the most influential novels of the 1960s after presenting some of the founders of the literary modernity that preceded the Boom: Jorge Luis Borges, Juan Rulfo, Miguel Angel Asturias, and Alejo Carpentier. Fuentes focuses on the Boom's protagonists—Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez, and Julio Cortázar—to highlight his ideas about the groundbreaking contributions of these novels.

Presidential Term Limits in Latin America: c.1820–1985

2019 ◽  
pp. 103-122
Author(s):  
Leiv Marsteintredet
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Term Limits ◽  
Third Wave ◽  
American Experience ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of ◽  
Democratic Rule

Latin America holds a 200-year-long history of presidential constitutions. The region’s constitutional and democratic experimentation throughout history makes it an interesting laboratory to study the origins, development, and effects of presidential term limits. Based primarily on data from constitutions, this chapter provides an overview of presidential term limits in Latin America from independence until 1985. The chapter shows how term limits have varied across countries and time, and that the implementation of strict term limits often came as a reaction to prior dictatorial rules. Whereas both proponents and critics of consecutive reelection invoked arguments of democracy in their favour, the Latin American experience up until the Third Wave of Democracy shows that stable, republican, and democratic rule has only been possible under a ban on immediate presidential re-election.

“Mendacious Inventions”, Veracious Perceptions: “The Peruvian Reality of Vargas Llosa's La Ciudad Y Los Perros”

1987 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 453-466
Author(s):  
Frederick M. Nunn
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Gabriel Garcia Marquez ◽  
Cultural Development ◽  
Nobel Lecture ◽  
American Novel ◽  
X Ray ◽  
American Novels ◽  
Literary Achievement ◽  
Os Sertoes

“The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own serves only to make us more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary.”Gabriel García Márquez, Nobel Lecture, 1982In the second half of this century, we have been told, the Latin American novel came of age. Authors no longer felt constrained to subject indigenous contents to alien forms. Instead contents suggested forms truly representative of societies, polities, and cultures in search of identity and struggling with numerous historic problems, some not even of their own region's making.Although Latin American novels have long been recognized as important to the area's cultural development, as indicators of literary achievement, and as valuable sources for scholars, few works published between Machado de Assis's Dom Casmuro (1900) and Miguel Angel Asturias's Men of Corn (Hombres de maiz, 1949) could be described as aesthetic magna opera. In the long hiatus essayists took up the task of portraying reality, producing such classics as Euclides da Cunha's Rebellion in the Backlands (Os Sertões, 1902), José Vasconcelos's The Cosmic Race (La raza cósmica, 1925), José Carlos Mariátegui's Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality (Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana, 1927), Alberto Edwards Vives's The Aristocratic Fronde (La fronda aristocrática, 1927), and Ezequiel Martínez Estrada's X-Ray of the Pampa (Radiografía de la pampa, 1933).

scholarly journals Gabriel García Márquez, History and the Labyrinth of Literature

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 107-130
Author(s):  
Rodica Grigore
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Historical Data ◽  
Gabriel Garcia Marquez ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Literary Discourse ◽  
The Novel ◽  
American Novel ◽  
Simon Bolivar

Gabriel García Márquez’s novel centered on Simón Bolívar, The General in His Labyrinth (El general en su laberinto, 1989) provoked mixed reactions from the literary critics. Some of them praised another masterpiece, whereas the others accused the Colombian author of creating a disrespectful portrait one of Latin America’s most important historical and symbolic figures The novel combines historical data and fiction in order to humanize the character of the Liberator and to destroy his nearly mythological image while at the same time examining the implications of previous literary discourse on the contemporary Latin American novel. Moreover García Márquez finds an original means of establishing a profound relationship between the magical realist aesthetics he used in One Hundred Years of Solitude and this particular form of pseudo-historical narrative that succeeds in expressing the humanity of its protagonist.

Latin American Print Culture in the 16th and 17th Centuries: The Colonial Period

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Blanca López de Mariscal
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
New Spain ◽  
New World ◽  
Printing Press ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Facilitated Communication ◽  
Complex Process ◽  
History Of ◽  
Formed Part ◽  
Mendicant Orders

The first printing workshops established in New Spain had been entrusted with a particular goal: they were designed to serve as support for the enormous work of indoctrination carried out by the mendicant orders—the so-called evangelization of the indigenous population. The Spanish Crown had assigned the first missionaries with the task of edifying the souls of those inhabitants in its new domains, both the Indians and the Spaniards, as well as creoles and mestizos who formed part of this new society. Therefore, the complex process of evangelization of the Indians became an overwhelming endeavor for the mendicant orders, requiring the support of the printing press. New works intended for the evangelization of the Indians began to appear, but Indians would not be the readers of such works; instead, their authors provided the missionaries with tools for the process of evangelization. These texts, often bilingual, facilitated communication with the inhabitants of the New World, particularly works on Christian doctrine, confessional manuals, sermons, and grammars (artes de la lengua). Accordingly, these genres were locally produced throughout the 16th century, and designed as instruments for the massive evangelization of the Indians. When considering the history of the Americas in the 16th and 17th centuries it is crucial to consider the arrival of the first books, the coming of the printing press as an instrument to facilitate evangelization of the New World, reading practices amongst Spaniards and mestizos, the formation of the first libraries, and the establishment of booksellers in the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru.

Judaism and Heterogeneity in the Modernist Long Novel

2015 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 357-379
Author(s):  
Jeremy Tambling
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Marcel Proust ◽  
Carlos Fuentes ◽  
American Novel ◽  
Dorothy Richardson ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Dreyfus Affair ◽  
Meaningful Category ◽  
Roberto Bolano

This paper explores how Judaism is represented in non-Jewish writers of the nineteenth-century (outstandingly, Walter Scott and George Eliot) and in modernist long novels, such as those by Dorothy Richardson, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Alfred Döblin, Robert Musil, and Thomas Mann, and, in the Latin American novel, Carlos Fuentes and Roberto Bolaño. It finds a relationship between the length of the ‘long’ novel, as a meaningful category in itself (not to be absorbed into other modernist narratives), and the interest that these novels have in Judaism, and in anti-semitism (e.g. in the Dreyfus affair) as something which cannot be easily assimilated into the narratives which the writers mentioned are interested in. The paper investigates the implications of this claim for reading these texts.

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