Magical Realism and Literature Cambridge Critical Concepts Series

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.

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.