Magical Realism in Hispanic American Literature - Summary

A new lesson from a TEACHER starts in which we are going to focus on a brief Summary of Magical Realism in Hispanic American Literature. This movement emerged at the beginning of the 20th century, mainly cultivated by Latin American writers, however, it is not until the middle of the century, back in the 50s, when its great ‘explosion’ is observed, a boom that made it famous worldwide, and that gave rise to names like Juan Rulfo, Alejo Carpentier or Gabriel García Márquez became internationally famous with works such as Pedro Paramo or One hundred years of loneliness. Surely listening to these titles you are becoming more and more interested in knowing what this peculiar literary movement consists of, right? Well, take a pencil and paper, because the lesson begins.

This summary of magical realism in Spanish American literature begins with a first point, the definition of movement:

We define magical realism as the literary movement that takes place in Latin America during the twentieth century in which

unreal, unusual or magical events are shown, as its name indicates, as something normal in the development of history, one more part of the everyday. That is, it can be considered as a way of telling, of narrating the world, or even an attitude towards reality.

Despite the fact that this movement began to be cultivated at the beginning of the 20th century, the novel by Cuban Alejo Carpentier The kingdom of this world, from 1949, is considered the first of the boom in this new way of telling life. As the author himself stated, "the real wonderful."

The literary critic Brett levinsonA great scholar of the movement, he recounted the style as a way of telling “unreal things treated as realistic, and worldly things as unreal elements”.