That’s why this genre is so often political. It’s disruptive – The winning side may well write history, but magical realist authors get to overturn the official version of events.Since then, still more English language writers have found their own magical realist angle, among them Alice Hoffman, Audrey Niffenegger, Neil Gaiman and Patrick Ness. South American authors like Isabel Allende and Gabriel Garcia Marquez come to most people’s minds when you say the term ‘magical realism’, but in the late 1980s Salman Rushdie put the spotlight on the genre for English-speaking countries. Borges published The Aleph, and the stage was set for a genre revolution. It wasn’t for another two decades that South American writers officially entered the fray, but when they arrived, they came with a bang. This, Kafka’s most famous work, was published ten years before the term magic realism was even coined (by the German art critic Franz Roh). #Magical realism definition how toIn this story, after an uneasy night filled with bad dreams, Gregor Samsa famously wakes up to find that he’s turned into a giant cockroach and must work out how to keep life as normal as possible. The magical realist timeline has its origin in Central Europe in 1915, with the publication of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis. If you’d asked me this before I did my creative writing MA, I’d have replied, ‘South America, of course.’ But although South American writers have loomed large, I’d have been totally wrong. I’m not so sure the two can be separated so neatly, but this doesn’t seem like a bad rule of thumb. In magical realism, by contrast, they’re perfectly ordinary happenings. The academic Maggie Ann Bowers insists that there’s a major distinction between the two genres.īowers feels that in fantasy, improbable events are treated as something extraordinary. While it’s true that critics and prize-givers value magical realism over fantasy, others see real differences. The late, great Terry Pratchett once said that identifying yourself as a magical realist author was ‘like a polite way of saying you write fantasy’. Marvellous realism originally pointed to common perspectives found in the art and literature of diverse South American cultures. Magic realism more properly describes paintings with fantasy or dream-like elements. These alternatives tend to be used as synonyms for magical realism, which is okay, but not technically correct. Most often you’ll hear talk of ‘magic realism’, and sometimes even ‘marvellous realism’. You’ll come across a number of terms related to magical realism. In magical realist literature, infant ghosts come back to join their still-living mothers (Toni Morrison’s Beloved) and the right confection can change your character ( Chocolat by Joanne Harris) – and no one so much as bats an eyelid at any of it. One of the most prolific writers of magical realism, Salman Rushdie, calls the genre ‘a commingling of the improbable and the mundane’ … But what exactly does that mean?
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