Magical Realism and the History of the Emotions in Latin America

Iconoclastic in spirit, Magical Realism and the History of the Emotions in LatinAmerica is the first study of affect and emotion in magical realist literature. Against the grain of a vast body of scholarship, it argues that magical realism is neither exotic commodity nor postcolonial resistance, but an art form fueled by a search for spaces of wonder in a disenchanted world. Linking the rise and fall of magical realism and kindred narrative forms to the shifting value of wonder as an emotional experience, this thought-provoking study proposes a radical new approach to canonical novels such as One Hundred Years of Solitude. Received as “one of the most convincing manifestations of the ‘turn to affect’ in contemporary Latin American critical thought,” Magical Realism and the History of the Emotions draws on affect theory, the history of emotions, and new materialism to reframe key questions in Latin American literature and culture.