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The Historical Role of Surrealism in Latin American Fiction

Magda Kučerková


In the history of art and literarure of the Latin American countries, the Avant-garde movement represents a remarkable process of cultural change, which had a considerable impact on the evolution of the imaginary on the South-American countries. The new literary sensivity had, in the first stage (20‘s of the 20th century), made an imprint especially on poetry, yet, its decisive influence on the development of fiction in the next decades cannot be omitted. First impulses for the development of specific literary conceptc or forms, e. g. The baroque and lo real maraviloso, or Latin American surrealism came out ot the European surrealism. This avant-garde movement had proven to be one of the most prominent in the Latin American fiction, and even if its influence was, in its time, overshadowed by Telurism and Creolism, it has contributed consideraby to the "disruption of tradition" and helped to discover new themes and creative methods reflecting the  mythological consciousness and cosmogony of the Latin American community, native folk art and ethnical traditions and the interest in the magical and the marvelous. Following these and many other attributes the paper attempts to evaluate the historical contribution of Surrealism to the rise of the modern Latin American fiction as known from the most influential novels of the second half of 20th century.


Keywords: Surrealism. Latin American Fiction. Ethnical Traditions.


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