Magical Realism and the History of the Emotions in Latin America

Authors

• Jerónimo Arellano

Files

Publication Date

1-2026

Description

Newly available in paperback, Magical Realism and the History of the Emotions in Latin America 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 wonder in a disenchanted world. Linking magical realism’s rise and fall to the shifting value of wonder as an emotional experience, Arellano 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,” this iconoclastic study draws on affect theory, the history of emotions, and new materialism to reframe key questions in Latin American literature and culture.

Keywords

Cabinet of Wonder, Wunderkammer, “One Room”, Niger Crocodile, “the emotions”, history of emotions, Deprong Mori, New World Pineapple, magical realism, magical realist narratives, new materialism, affect theory, affective orientation, collective feeling, Alejo Carpentier, lo real maravilloso americano, Cien años de soledad, El mago, César Aira, Neocolonialism, André Breton, David Wilson, Rosamond Purcell, Wonders and the Order of Nature, Marvelous ordinary, Neoformalism, Brinkema, Fredric Jameson, Lucien Febvre, History of wonder, Christopher Columbus, Quiccheberg’s, Fear room, Wonder, Ethnographic surrealism, Exotica, Surrealism, MJT, Columbus’s Journals, Stephen Greenblatt, crónica de Indias, Jean de Léry, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Tupinamba, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, contemporary Latin American literature, Richard Dyer, Linda Williams, El reino de este mundo, De lo real maravilloso americano, lo real maravilloso, Manifesto of Surrealism, Colonialism, El Camino de Santiago, Juan el Romero, Los pasos perdidos, Mark Ryden, avant-garde, inverted exoticism, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez, Antonio Pigafetta, Technological sublime, José Arcadio Buendía, Melquíades, Sandra Harding, Determinism, Essentialism, Empire of Dreams, Giannina Braschi, Tess O’Dwyer, Alberto Fuguet, Hans Chans, Man Ray, Joseph Cornell, Postmodern, Intimate Diary of Solitude, Essentialized primitivism, Idelber, Avelar, Alberto Moreira, José María Arguedas, El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo, Paolo Virno, Julio Cortázar, Elsa Drucaroff

Rights

Paperback edition copyright © 2026 Bucknell University Press Reprinted from the English language edition of Magical Realism and the History of the Emotions in Latin America by Jerónimo Arellano and originally published by Bucknell University Press. Copyright © 2015 by the author. Reprinted into and published in the English language by arrangement with Bloomsbury Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.

Language

eng

ISBN

9781684485840