Magical Realism and Literature

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

Christopher Warnes (Edited by), Kim Anderson Sasser (Edited by)

9781108426305, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 12 November 2020

420 pages
23.4 x 16 x 2.8 cm, 0.72 kg

'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

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.

Introduction Christopher Warnes and Kim Anderson Sasser
Part I. Origins: 1. Magic and otherness Christopher Warnes
2. Primitivism, ethnography, and magical realism Erik Camayd-Freixas
3. Magical realism and indigeneity: from appropriation to resurgence Maggie Ann Bowers
4. Insubstantial selves in magical realism in the Americas Lois Parkinson Zamora
5. Space, time and magical realism Ato Quayson
Part II. Development: 6. Magical realism and the 'boom' of the Latin American novel Ignacio López-Calvo
7. Magical realism: the European trajectory Theo D'haen
8. Beautiful lies: magical realism in Australasia Maria Takolander
9. Myth, orality and the African novel Graham Riach
10. Breaking boundaries: the tale of North American magical realism Shannin Schroeder
11. East Asian magical realism Ben Holgate
12. Magic and realism in South Asia Sourit Bhattacharya
13. Fantastic cohabitations: magical realism in Arabic and Hebrew Alexandra Chreiteh (Shraytekh)
Part III. Application: 14. From the inside of belief: magic and religion Kim Anderson Sasser
15. Word, image, and cinematic ekphrasis in magical realist trauma narratives Eugene Arva
16. Scheherazade in the diaspora: home and the city in Arab migrant fiction Jumana Bayeh
17. Ecomagical realism in Alexis Wright's Carpentaria and Linda Hogan's People of the Whale Laura A. Pearson
18. Proximate magic: magical realism in Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 Wendy Faris and Miho Nonaka
19. Magic and the literary market Ursula Kluwick
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Hispanic & Latino studies [JFSL4], Literary reference works [DSR], Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH], Literary theory [DSA]