Realismo magico y primitivismo en la novela hispanoamericana de Alejo Carpentier, Miguel Angel Asturias, Juan Rulfo y Gabriel Garcia Marquez

This thesis brings anthropology, modern art, intellectual history, reception aesthetics and semiotics to a fresh reading of The Kingdom of This World, Men of Maize, Pedro Paramo, and One Hundred Years of Solitude. Following the texts and a critique of the term, it develops a theory of Magic Realism along ethnological lines as a meaningful critical concept shown to be operant within a discrete segment of Latin American literary history.;Chapter One documents the historical kinship of Magic Realism and Primitivism in ideological and aesthetic trends in Europe and Latin America: americanismo, myth, utopia, surrealism and the avant-garde. I suggest it owes much to avant-garde primitivism, kindled by the rise of ethnology and the decline of positivist and evolutionary thought. The application of primitivist principles to Latin American aesthetics, long overdue, illustrates aesthetic primitivism and its relevance for the isomorphic correlations of modern painting, Mexican muralism and Magic Realist narrative.;Chapter Two proposes a theory of Magic Realism as a narrato-logical unity of three primary traits (the primitive viewpoint, the transculturation of reality-norms, and the construction of historical allegory), which explain numerous secondary traits common to the novels. It synthesizes a body of archaic conventions and makes other contributions to primitivist aesthetics. Magic Realism is distinguished from the fantastic, the marvellous, the absurd and the uncanny, and linked in significant ways to Carpentier's theory of the "real-marvellous".;Subsequent chapters examine the problems and development of Magic Realism in the thought and texts of Carpentier, Asturias, Rulfo, Garcia Marquez and others, emphasizing individual solutions to issues of verisimilitude, authority and ideology. New interpretations of the novels are enriched by issues in aesthetic theory, anthropology and history. A closing discussion of Magic Realism and Postmodernism focuses on parody, caricature, carnival, and post-colonial ideology.