Latin American Literature: Modernism, Boom & Magical Realism

XX Hispanoamericana: LÍRICA — a glorious moment occurs when modernism manifests itself as a movement of political affirmation and cultural renewal. In the first years of the twentieth century, modernism reaches its fullness in Rubén Darío, José Martí, and Julio Herrera y Reissig. It had great influence until 1920, when it is followed by the avant-garde.

Modernism arises with the arrival at the end of the nineteenth century of writers such as José Martí, Rubén Darío and José Asunción Silva, who moved away from a specifically European literary canon and sought an identity in the colonial period. This development took place when Romanticism and the early nineteenth-century independence movements were reshaping the various Hispano-American republics. That historical process finally culminated in 1898 with Spain's loss of its island colonies of Cuba and Puerto Rico in the Americas and the Philippines in Asia. It is considered the peak moment of Latin American literature.

The so-called Boom begins around the 1940s and corresponds with a flowering of realistic literature infused with the marvelous or magical. In this regard, José Donoso provides a clear explanation in his autobiographical Boom: Personal History. Among the key writers associated with the first stage of this movement are, in addition to those already mentioned, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Horacio Quiroga, Manuel Puig, Juan Carlos Onetti, Pablo Neruda, César Vallejo, Ciro Alegría, José Carlos Mariátegui, Mario Vargas Llosa, Alfredo Bryce Echenique, José Vasconcelos, Gabriel García Márquez, Alejo Carpentier, José Lezama Lima, Augusto Roa Bastos, and Miguel Ángel Asturias.

Poetry: Modernism, Creacionismo and Key Poets

POETRY: After a postmodern period, Latin American poetry embraced the avant-garde. That movement gave rise to major creative forces such as Creacionismo, which was influential even beyond the region and was exported to Spain. Modernism triumphed; its greatest figure was Rubén Darío. The three best-known poets of the modern and postmodern periods include César Vallejo, Jorge Luis Borges, and Pablo Neruda.

Narrative: Realism, Indigenismo, and Magical Realism

NARRATIVE: The traditional novel often remained realistic, addressing human and social problems and frequently incorporating indigenismo, as well as the wild and the wonderful. The magical realism novel is a complex representation of the world in which the rational coexists with dream and fantasy. It has often been presented as the only viable way to portray South American reality, which differs from Europe in the survival of the magical or wonderful and in the telluric force of nature.

Characteristics:

• Incorporation of the magical, the legendary, and the mythic.
• Formal innovations such as the use of interior monologue, complex structures, and chronological disorder.
• Novels set in urban and rural environments that draw on the strength of nature and local tradition.

Representative novels and authors include the Guatemalan Miguel Ángel Asturias (El Señor Presidente), the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier (notably works such as The Kingdom of This World and others), and the Mexican Juan Rulfo (Pedro Páramo).

Jorge Luis Borges is the author of numerous books of short stories that range between the fantastic and the intellectual and explore topics such as the fate of man and his identity, time, eternity, and infinity — for example, Ficciones and El Aleph.