Magical Realism and Literature

Description

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 Garcia Marquez, 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.

Kim Anderson Sasser is an Associate Professor of English at Wheaton College, Illinois, where she teaches topics related to global Anglophone literature and postcolonial studies. She is the author of Magical Realism and Cosmopolitanism: Strategizing Belonging (2014), as well as numerous other articles and book chapters on magical realism. Christopher Warnes teaches in the English Faculty at the University of Cambridge and is a Fellow of St John's College. He is a former chair of the Postcolonial Studies Association. He has published widely on magical realism, including Magical Realism and the Postcolonial Novel: Between Faith and Irreverence (2009). He is currently finishing a book on South African literature after apartheid.

'Taking an interdisciplinary, comparative, and transgeographical approach, this book encourages readers to rethink and amplify their knowledge of magical realism ... Recommended.' I. Portaro, Choice Magazine 'the essays collected in this dense and well-edited critical anthology make abundantly clear that magical realism has become a truly cosmopolitan mode of writing in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries ... this volume offers innovative perspectives on a mode of writing that is now entering its second century. Being a coherently structured and effectively written book, Magical Realism and Literature will rapidly become an indispensable research tool for all scholars in the field.' Marc Maufort, Magical Realisms for a Global Twenty-first Century