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  • Chapter 6 - Magical Realism and the ‘Boom’ of the Latin American Novel

  • from Part II - Development
  • Edited by Christopher Warnes, University of Cambridge, Kim Anderson Sasser, Wheaton College, Illinois
  • Book:
    Magical Realism and Literature
    Published online:
    22 October 2020
    Print publication:
    12 November 2020, pp 101-116

  • Summary

    Instead of seeing Boom authors as the beneficiaries of international economic developments and marketing campaigns or as passive victims of US political propaganda during the Cold War, it would be wiser to acknowledge their ideological and literary agency. Magical realism, as well as other Boom aesthetic choices, including modernist experimentalism, responded to two separate developments. First, independently from a potential influence of CIA-backed political propaganda in Latin America, they were an inevitable outcome of the direct literary influence of US and European masters. Second, magical realism and other modernist formal experimentation used by the Boom authors, rather than being a nod to anti-communist US propaganda during the Cold War era, were a direct and personal reaction precisely against the strict internationalist political dictums coming first from the Soviet Union and then from Cuba. They responded to a self-affirmation of the authors' autonomy and individual/national approach against Soviet and Cuban revolutionary impositions.