Magic realism

Magic realism (or magical realism) is a literary genre in which magical elements appear in an otherwise realistic setting. The term was coined in the 1920s by a German art critic to describe a trend in post-Expressionist German art (see History below), but it is most often associated with the Latin American literary boom of the twentieth century, marked by the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez in 1967, which is considered the seminal magical realist text. Magical realism can be detected in the supernatural tales of E.T.A. Hoffman, which are related in the down-to-earth tone of confessional journalism. Magical realism may be viewed as more than a specific historical-geographical literary movement; it is an element of style that can be located in a large variety of novels, poetry, painting, and even film.

History

The term magic realism was first used by the German art critic Franz Roh to refer to a painterly style also known as Neue Sachlichkeit. It was later used to describe the unusual realism by American painters such as Ivan Albright, Paul Cadmus, George Tooker and other artists during the 1920s. It should be noted though that unlike the term's use in literature, in art it is describing paintings that do not include anything fantastic or magical, but are rather extremely realistic and often times mundane.

Related Topics:
Franz Roh - Ivan Albright - Paul Cadmus - George Tooker - 1920s

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The term was first revived and applied to the realm of fiction as a comibination of the fantastic and the realistic in the 1960s by a Venezuelan essayist and critic Arturo Uslar-Pietri, who applied it to a very specific South American genre; it came in vogue only after Nobel prize winner Miguel Angel Asturias used the expression to define the style of his novels. The term gained popularity with the rise of such authors as Mikhail Bulgakov, Ernst Jünger, and many Latin American writers, most notably Jorge Luis Borges, Isabel Allende and Gabriel García Márquez, who confessed, "My most important problem was destroying the lines of demarcation that separates what seems real from what seems fantastic." The most widely read of the South American magical realism narratives is García Márquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. Today, magical realism is perhaps too broadly used, to characterize all realistic fictions with an eerie, otherworldly component, such as the tales of Edgar Allen Poe.

Related Topics:
Arturo Uslar-Pietri - Nobel prize - Mikhail Bulgakov - Ernst Jünger - Latin America - Jorge Luis Borges - Isabel Allende - Gabriel García Márquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude - Edgar Allen Poe

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