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In this compelling and engaging volume, Jerónimo Arellano feeds from one of the most "exquisite corpses" in Latin American culture and literary studies—magical realism. Arellano intersects two main areas of study: the peaks and valleys of Latin American magical realist fiction and the cultural history of emotions. He reads magical realism against the grain and rejects studying it as a by-product of colonial wonder that renders its aesthetics through a self-exoticizing neocolonial lens, choosing instead to focus on its affective orientation. His interest resides in the marvelous realia present in Latin American fiction and material culture and therefore his focus is both transhistorical and transnational. Starting from the general vantage point of the "cultural history of wonder" (xviii), his argument is twofold: One, the intersection between the history of the cabinet of wonders and of the marvelous ordinary in Latin America needs to be mapped attending to "transhistorical dissonances within transhistorical resonances" (xix). Two, the binary of a Western world that represents rationalism and a non-Western sphere that stands for wonder is untenable and falsifies the way these cultural histories of wonder have developed over time and space.
The book is divided in two parts. The first one is entitled "Wonder in the Colonial Heart." The opening chapter offers a brief history of wonder as an emotion that changes not only through time but also through space (4). The "wunderkammer fever," as Arellano calls it, permeated both the Old and New Worlds. The author here shows the breadth of his knowledge on the topic as he travels alongside the vicissitudes of...