The Fear of Solitude: How Marketing Makes Real Magic

Abstract

Holgate explores how a book from the geographical and cultural margins can achieve an international readership and canonical status by re-tracing the journeys of two magical realist novels, Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and New Zealand Maori author Keri Hulme’s The Bone People (1984). He investigates the mechanics by which a global audience is attained, and what is won and lost in the process, building on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the field of cultural production. He concludes that international recognition depends not only on the artistic qualities of the author and their text, but also other factors like the actions of the author’s various agents, subnational literature’s capacity to transcend its local audience, prestige consecrated by major literary prizes, and luck.