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.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

JERÓNIMO ARELLANO is an assistant professor of Latin American literature at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts.

A Note on Translations  vii
List of Figures  ix
Acknowledgments  xi
Introduction  xiii
I: Wonder in the Colonial Heart  1        
1. The Intermittence of the Marvelous  3           
2. Columbus’s First Journal and the Materiality of the Emotions  37     
3. Colonial Chronicles as Archives of Feelings  61         
II: The Afterlives of Feelings  101
4. Alejo Carpentier’s lo real maravilloso americano and the Colonial History of Wonder  103
5. The Afterlives of Feelings: Wonder as Palimpsest in Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad  137
6. In the Graveyards of Magical Realism: The Disaffection of the Marvelous and César Aira’s El mago  165
Bibliography  185
Index  203
About the Author  211