Book contents
- Alejo Carpentier in Context
- Alejo Carpentier in Context
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Chronology of Alejo Carpentier’s Life and Works
- Chapter 1 Introduction
- Part I The Making of the Author
- Part II The Polymath
- Part III The Writer of Fiction
- Part IV The Cuban Revolution
- Part V Envisioning the Americas
- Chapter 25 Antillean Surrealism
- Chapter 26 An Ecological Marvelous Realism
- Chapter 27 About Not Guillotining the Past
- Part VI Carpentier for Debate
- Index
- References
Chapter 26 - An Ecological Marvelous Realism
Carpentier’s Teeming American Tropics
from Part V - Envisioning the Americas
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2026
Edited by
Book contents
- Alejo Carpentier in Context
- Alejo Carpentier in Context
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Chronology of Alejo Carpentier’s Life and Works
- Chapter 1 Introduction
- Part I The Making of the Author
- Part II The Polymath
- Part III The Writer of Fiction
- Part IV The Cuban Revolution
- Part V Envisioning the Americas
- Chapter 25 Antillean Surrealism
- Chapter 26 An Ecological Marvelous Realism
- Chapter 27 About Not Guillotining the Past
- Part VI Carpentier for Debate
- Index
- References
Summary
This essay interprets Carpentier’s American cycle of novels from the perspective of the environmental humanities. It defines Carpentier’s “ecological marvelous realism” as a literary motif in which organisms interact with their environments in ways that are ordinary yet marvelous. Most important, Carpentier’s ecological marvelous real features surprising shape-shifting capacities of peoples, plants, animals, and insects in the New World that destabilize boundaries and hierarchies between humans and nonhumans.This new ecocritical reading of the Cuban author’s most famous works aims to reassess his status in the canonical Latin American literary tradition and question a central tenet of the field of multispecies studies.
Keywords
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- Type
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- Information
- Alejo Carpentier in Context , pp. 309 - 320Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2026
References
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