Beyond Individualism: Portraying Collective Selfhood in Latin American Literature and Art

Beyond Individualism examines the portrayal of collective identities over two centuries in Latin American literature and visual art. Lois Parkinson Zamora shows that many authors and artists are less concerned with singular selves than with selves-in-relation: less with individual autonomy than communal affiliation. Their works--sometimes labeled neobaroque, magical realism, surrealism, expressionism, and idealism--resist the kind of psychological realism typical of European and North American novels, moving instead toward a wholly new kind of fiction.

Zamora calls this new Latin American form "archetypal realism" because its characters represent entities larger than themselves. They sometimes embody entire communities, cultures, families, religious orders, or ideal planets. Through deft readings of collective characters in fiction by Gabriel García Márquez,