Understanding Gabriel García Márquez [antikvár]

EDITOR'S PREFACE Understanding Contemporary European and Latin American Literature has been planned as a series of guides for students and nonacademic readers. Like its companion series, Understanding Contemporary American Literature, the aim of the books is to provide a brief introduction to the life and writings of prominent contemporary authors and to explicate their most important works. Contemporary literature makes special demands, and this is particularly true of foreign literature, in which the reader must contend only with unfamiliar, often arcane artistic conventions and philosophical concepts, but also with the handicap of reading the literature in translation. It is a truism that the nuances of the language can be rendered in another only imperfectly (and this problem is especially difficult in fiction), but the fact that the words of European and Latin American writers are situated in a historical and cultural setting quite different from our own can be as great a hindrance to the understanding of these works as the linguistic barrier. For this reason, the UCELL series will emphasize the sociological and historical background of the writers treated. The peculiar philosophical and cultural traditions of a given culture may be particularly important for an understanding of certain authors, and these will be taken up in the introductory chapter and also in the discussion of