Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude: A Casebook (Casebooks in Criticism)

One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad, 1967), by Gabriel García Márquez, is the multi-generational story of the Buendía Family, whose patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, founds the town of Macondo, the metaphoric Colombia. The non-linear story is narrated via different time frames, a technique derived from the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (as in The Garden of Forking Paths).The story, considered to be the author's magnum opus, was first published in Spanish in 1967, and succeeded until translated to thirty-seven languages.[1] The magical realist style and thematic substance of One Hundred Years of Solitude established it as an important, representative novel of the literary Latin American Boom of the 1960s and 1970s,[2] that was stylistically influenced by Modernism (European and North American), and the Cuban Vanguardia (Vanguard) literary movement.
Casebooks in Criticism 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 García Márquez'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 García Márquez'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 García Márquez.

A conversation with Gabriel García Márquez / Gene Bell-Villada García Márquez, on second reading / Carlos Fuentes Gabriel García Márquez, One hundred years of solitude / James Higgins The humor of One hundred years of solitude / Clive Griffin The sacred harlots of One hundred years of solitude / Lorraine Elena Roses Aureliano's smile / Michael Wood The limits of the liberal imagination : One hundred years of solitude and Nostromo / Jean Franco One hundred years of solitude as chronicle of the Indies / Iris Zavala Banana strike and military massacre : One hundred years of solitude and what happened in 1928 / Gene H. Bell-Villada The dark side of magical realism : science, oppression and apocalypse in One hundred years of solitude / Brian Conniff Streams out of control : the Latin American plot / Carlos Rincon. This collection includes ten articles by different authors that offer in-depth readings of the novel. Among the topics examined are myth, magic, women, western imperialism, and the media. The book also includes a 1982 interview with the author THE FOLLOWING CHAT with Garcia Marquez took place in his home on Calle Fuego, in the Pedregal section of Mexico City.