Magical Realism and Literature

A comprehensive, global, cutting-edge study of magical realism exploring its history, development, and relevance to real-world issues.

This book offers insight into the history of ideas behind magical realism by exploring its development in regions across the globe and providing new perspectives on primitivism, ethnography, and selfhood. It will appeal to graduate students and researchers of postcolonial fiction, transnational literary developments, and magical realism.Magical realism can lay claim to being one of most recognizable genres of prose writing. It mingles the probable and improbable, the real and the fantastic, and it provided the late-twentieth century novel with an infusion of creative energy in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and beyond. Writers such as Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, Salman Rushdie, Ben Okri, and many others harnessed the resources of narrative realism to the representation of folklore, belief, and fantasy. This book sheds new light on magical realism, exploring in detail its global origins and development. It offers new perspectives of the history of the ideas behind this literary tradition, including magic, realism, otherness, primitivism, ethnography, indigeneity, and space and time.