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Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude: A Casebook (Casebooks in Criticism)
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Product Description
Casebooks in Criticism (General Editor: William L. Andrews) offer analytical and interpretive frameworks for understanding key texts in world literature and film. Each casebook reprints documents relating to a work's historical context and reception, presents the best critical studies, and, when possible, features an interview with the author. Accessible and informative to scholars, students, and nonspecialist readers alike, the books in this series provide a wide range of critical and informative commentaries on major texts. Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude is arguably the most important novel in twentieth-century Latin American literature. This Casebook features ten critical articles on Garcia Marquez's great work. Carefully selected from the most important work on the novel over the past three decades, they include pieces by Carlos Fuentes, Iris Zavala, James Higgins, Jean Franco, Michael Wood, and Gene H. Bell-Villada. Among the intriguing aspects of the work discussed are its mythic dimension, its "magical" side, its representations of women, its relationship with past chronicles of exploration and discovery, its portrayals of Western power and imperialism, its astounding diffusion throughout the globe and the media, and its simple truth-telling, its fidelity to the tangled history of Latin America. The book incorporates several theoretical approaches--historical, feminist, postcolonial; the first English translation of Fuentes's renowned, oft-cited, eight page meditation on the work; a general introduction; and a 1982 interview with Garcia Marquez.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #86207 in Books
- Published on: 2002-01-10
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Paperback
- 192 pages
Features
- ISBN13: 9780195144550
- Condition: USED - VERY GOOD
- Notes:
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Editorial Reviews
About the Author
Gene H. Bell-Villada is Professor of Romance Languages at Williams College. He is the author of five other books and numerous articles, reviews, and satires.
Customer Reviews
Helpful, but like so many anthologies, uneven
This book cannot fail to be of use to anyone trying to gain a fuller understanding of García Márquez's ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE. Although not useless to advanced readers, the collection is explicitly targeted at readers approaching the text for the first time. I imagine they had this in mind as a college text to accompany the novel.
Anthologies are almost always uneven, with some essays justifying the cost of the book, and others that seem to either muddy the water or just waste one's time. This collection is no exception. Several of the essays are superb. In general, as the editor acknowledges in the Introduction, the clearest, most helpful essays are those by scholars working in Great Britain. The least helpful are those scholars--either American or Latin American--in the grips of literary theory. One of the essays is so densely written that nearly the entire piece consists of buzz words from cultural studies and comparative literature. I can't imagine many college level readers having the background to penetrate such an essay, while many advanced scholars will recognize that such an essay covers up lack of content by an excess of lingo.
Nonetheless, by picking and choosing, one will gain a great deal of help in reading García Márquez's great novel. There is a good deal of helpful biographical and historical information, as well as a number of excellent critical pieces analyzing various aspects of the book. I found the essays in the first two thirds of the book to be more helpful than those in the last third, with some exceptions in each section.
And yes, the font is small, but I didn't have the trouble reading the book that the first reviewer had.
This book is a treasure.
This is my favorite book. I have read it so many times I have lost the count, and each time I feel and live it and I can't put it down. It's the brightest jewel in the Latin American literature. This is a jealous book, it's not for the people who "act" as if they were reading, while thinking of something else. It demands your full attention. If you have trouble following a complex story line, I recomend you to read it while keeping a pencil and paper handy so you can draw the Buendia's family tree. It will help you to follow the story. That's what I told my mom to do and it worked out right. If you are feeling adventurous and want to read a story full of life, passion, death, and love, this is the book for you. I have never ever found another book so human inspite of being magical. I invite you to read it, if you really follow this book, you won't regret the hours you spent immersed in it.
Excellent material
Excellent material but the print is too small to read without strain even with glasses.
