Ascent to Glory

How One Hundred Years of Solitude Was Written and Became a Global Classic

Ascent to Glory
Alvaro Santana-Acuna
RRP:
NZ$ 83.00
Our Price:
NZ$ 68.48
Paperback
h235 x 156mm - 384pg
11 Aug 2020 US
International import eta 10-30 days
9780231184335
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Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude seemed destined for obscurity upon its publication in 1967. The little-known author, small publisher, magical style, and setting in a remote Caribbean village were hardly the usual ingredients for success in the literary marketplace. Yet today it ranks among the best-selling books of all time. Translated into dozens of languages, it continues to enter the lives of new readers around the world. How did One Hundred Years of Solitude achieve this unlikely success? And what does its trajectory tell us about how a work of art becomes a classic?Ascent to Glory is a groundbreaking study of One Hundred Years of Solitude, from the moment Garcia Marquez first had the idea for the novel to its global consecration. Using new documents from the author's archives, Alvaro Santana-Acuna shows how Garcia Marquez wrote the novel, going beyond the many legends that surround it. He unveils the literary ideas and networks that made possible the book's creation and initial success. Santana-Acuna then follows this novel's path in more than seventy countries on five continents and explains how thousands of people and organizations have helped it to become a global classic. Shedding new light on the novel's imagination, production, and reception, Ascent to Glory is an eye-opening book for cultural sociologists and literary historians as well as for fans of Garcia Marquez and One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Ascent to Glory is an original and important book. It's very well written, theoretically complex, and advances a compelling explanation of the processes through which Cien Anos de Soledad achieved the status of a classic. Alvaro Santana Acuna is going to be a well-known and respected scholar in cultural sociology for years to come. -- Claudio E. Benzecry, author of The Opera Fanatic: Ethnography of an ObsessionIn this work of love and true scholarship, Santana-Acuna opens new vistas for how to make sense of world literature today. In beautifully crafted prose, his meticulous analysis delights and enlightens about how it happens that creative work first gets legs and goes on to take new life and meaning again and again, for different people across many contexts and times. Academics and the general public alike will emerge from Ascent to Glory with a sense of satisfaction and improved understanding. I recommend it to all those who appreciate global works of art, literary or otherwise, or literature tout court. -- Michele Lamont, past president of the American Sociological AssociationGarcia Marquez's novel used the writer's own past to imagine, between the lines, a better future. As one of those sociologists who is a 'historian of the present,' Alvaro Santana-Acuna has reflected the Colombian writer's singular achievement. I believe his readers will be inspired to use this book, which is full of new ideas, to think more lucidly about the unusually challenging future that now lies before us, both in literature and in life. -- Gerald Martin, author of Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A LifeI have been waiting for this book. One Hundred Years of Solitude is arguably the most influential novel of the last fifty years, but how did that happen? Alvaro Santana-Acuna's extraordinary feat is to lay bare the mechanisms through which a great work of fiction becomes a whole culture. He has probably given us the definitive account of that miracle. -- Juan Gabriel Vasquez, author of The Shape of the Ruins: A Novel
Alvaro Santana-Acuna is an assistant professor of sociology at Whitman College.
Status: Active
ISBN-13: 9780231184335
Published: 11 Aug 2020
Published In: United States
Imprint: Columbia University Press
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Format: Paperback
Height: 235mm
Width: 156mm
Pages: 384

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