Deconstructing Paradise: Inverted Religious Symbolism in Twentieth-Century Latin American Literature

Arenas, Reinaldo

Edmondson, Belinda

Fradinger, Moira

Bello, Andres

<em>Casebooks in Criticism</em> offer analytical and interpretive frameworks for understanding key texts in world literature and film. Each casebook reprints documents relating to a work's historical context and reception, presents the best critical studies, and, when possible, features an interview with the author. Accessible and informative to scholars, students, and nonspecialist readers alike, the books in this series provide a wide range of critical and informative commentaries on major texts. <p/>Gabriel García Márquez's <em>One Hundred Years of Solitude</em> is arguably the most important novel in twentieth-century Latin American literature. This Casebook features ten critical articles on García Márquez's great work. Carefully selected from the most important work on the novel over the past three decades, they include pieces by Carlos Fuentes, Iris Zavala, James Higgins, Jean Franco, Michael Wood, and Gene H. Bell-Villada. Among the intriguing aspects of the work discussed are its mythic dimension, its "magical" side, its representations of women, its relationship with past chronicles of exploration and discovery, its portrayals of Western power and imperialism, its astounding diffusion throughout the globe and the media, and its simple truth-telling, its fidelity to the tangled history of Latin America. The book incorporates several theoretical approaches--historical, feminist, postcolonial&#x3b; the first English translation of Fuentes's renowned, oft-cited, eight page meditation on the work&#x3b; a general introduction&#x3b; and a 1982 interview with García Márquez.

de Castro, Juan E