Magical realism is often regarded as a regional trend, restricted to the Latin American writers who popularized it as a literary form. In this critical anthology, the first of its kind, editors Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris show magical realism to be an international movement with a wide-ranging history and a significant influence among the literatures of the world. In essays on texts by writers as diverse as Toni Morrison, Günter Grass, Salman Rushdie, Derek Walcott, Abe Kobo, Gabriel García Márquez, and many others, magical realism is examined as a worldwide phenomenon.
Presenting the first English translation of Franz Roh’s 1925 essay in which the term magical realism was coined, as well as Alejo Carpentier’s classic 1949 essay that introduced the concept of lo real maravilloso to the Americas, this anthology begins by tracing the foundations of magical realism from its origins in the art world to its current literary contexts. It offers a broad range of critical perspectives and theoretical approaches to this movement, as well as intensive analyses of various cultural traditions and individual texts from Eastern Europe, Asia, North America, Africa, the Caribbean, and Australia, in addition to those from Latin America. In situating magical realism within the expanse of literary and cultural history, this collection describes a mode of writing that has been a catalyst in the development of new regional literatures and a revitalizing force for more established narrative traditions—writing particularly alive in postcolonial contexts and a major component of postmodernist fiction.
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris - Introduction: Daiquiri Birds and Flaubertian Parrot(ie)s
- I. Foundations
- Franz Roh - Magic Realism: Post-Expressionism (1925)
- Irene Guenther - Magic Realism, New Objectivity, and the Arts during the Weimar Republic
- Alejo Carpentier - On the Marvelous Real in America (1949)
- Alejo Carpentier - The Baroque and the Marvelous Real (1975)
- Angel Flores - Magical Realism in Spanish American Fiction (1955)
- Luis Leal - Magical Realism in Spanish American Literature (1967)
- Amaryll Chanady - The Territorialization of the Imaginary in Latin America: Self-Affirmation and Resistance to Metropolitan Paradigms
- Scott Simpkins - Sources of Magic Realism/Supplements to Realism in Contemporary Latin American Literature
- II. Theory
- Wendy B. Faris - Scheherazade's Children: Magical Realism and Postmodern Fiction
- Theo L. D'haen - Magic Realism and Postmodernism: Decentering Privileged Centers
- Rawdon Wilson - The Metamorphoses of Fictional Space: Magical Realism
- Jon Thiem - The Textualization of the Reader in Magical Realist Fiction
- Jeanne Delbaere-Garant - Psychic Realism, Mythic Realism, Grotesque Realism: Variations on Magic Realism in Contemporary Literature in English
- III. History
- John Burt Foster Jr. - Magical Realism, Compensatory Vision, and Felt History: Classical Realism Transformed in The White Hotel
- P. Gabrielle Foreman - Past-On Stories: History and the Magically Real, Morrison and Allende on Call
- Richard Todd - Narrative Trickery and Performative Historiography: Fictional Representation of National Identity in Graham Swift, Peter Carey, and Mordecai Richler
- Patricia Merivale - Saleem Fathered by Oskar: Midnight's Children, Magic Realism, and The Tin Drum
- Steven F. Walker - Magical Archetypes: Midlife Miracles in The Satanic Verses
- David Mikics - Derek Walcott and Alejo Carpentier: Nature, History, and the Caribbean Writer
- IV. Community
- Stephen Slemon - Magic Realism as Postcolonial Discourse
- John Erickson - Metoikoi and Magical Realism in the Maghrebian Narratives of Tahar ben Jelloun and Abdelkebir Khatibi
- Susan J. Napier - The Magic of Identity: Magic Realism in Modern Japanese Fiction
- Melissa Stewart - Roads of "Exquisite Mysterious Muck": The Magical Journey through the City in William Kennedy's Ironweed, John Cheever's "The Enormous Radio," and Donald Barthelme's "City Life"
- Lois Parkinson Zamora - Magical Romance/Magical Realism: Ghosts in U.S. and Latin American Fiction
- Selected Bibliography
- Contributors
- Index
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