Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Ovid: Magical and Monstrous Realities

This book explores the ways in which Ovid’s poem, Metamorphoses, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, use magical devices to construct their literary realities.
The study examines in detail the similarities and differences of each author’s style and investigates the impact of politics and culture upon the magical and frequently brutal realities the two authors create in their works. Ultimately the book is interested in the use of magical elements by authors in political climates where freedoms are being restricted, and by using magical realism to explore Ovid’s Metamorphoses, it is able to illuminate aspects of the regime of emperor Augustus and the world of Ovid and demonstrate their closeness to that of Garcia Marquez’s Colombia.

Lorna Robinson holds a PhD in Classics from University College London. She is the author of Cave Canem: A Miscellany of Latin Words and Phrases and the essay ‘The Golden Age in Metamorphoses’ and ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ in A Companion to Magical Realism (Tamesis, 2005).