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Landscapes of Realism: Rethinking literary realism in comparative perspectives
Edited by Svend Erik Larsen, Steen Bille Jørgensen and Margaret R. Higonnet
[Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages XXXIII] 2022
► pp. 955–974

The real magic in Miguel Ángel Asturias’s magical realism

Legends of Guatemala and The President

| Aarhus University

In this case study it is argued that the Latin American magical realism is a ‘laboratory’ for exploring the relation between realism and the real. Furthermore, it is argued that magical realism should not be seen as an enchantment, but rather as an investigation of the real, especially of causality and temporality. The study begins with a discussion of the general understanding of magical realism and its position within world literature. It presents Asturias’s form of Magical Realism as transcultural. The main focus of the study is a comparative analysis of two texts by Miguel Ángel Asturias, the mythologically founded Leyendas de Guatemala (1930), and the novel El señor presidente (1946), which is often considered to be a portrait of the dictator Manuel Estrada Cabrera and his authoritarian regime (1898–1920). Despite the differences between the texts, this study argues that the texts share the same realistic ambition and that their combination of styles, inspired by the Maya text Popol Vuh and surrealism, serves the function of exploring particularly strange experiences of reality. At the end, Asturias is briefly situated within the Latin American tradition.

Keywords: magical realism, the real, Asturias, myth, Maya, surrealism, enchantment, transcultural, object-oriented ontology, causality, temporality
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Magical realism
  • 3.Asturias and magical realism
    • 3.1The beginning of magical realism
    • 3.2Legends of Guatemala
    • 3.3The President
  • 4.The Good, the bad, and the cool: Magical realism as world literature
  • Notes
  • Works cited
Published online: 16 March 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/chlel.xxxiii.26sim
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