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.

Relation to other genres and movements

As a literary style, magical realism often overlaps or is confused with other genres and movements.

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• Postmodernism ? Magical realism is often considered, as a genre, a subcategory of postmodern fiction due to its challenge to hegemony and its use of techniques similar to those of other postmodernist texts, such as the distortion of time.
• Surrealism ? Many early magical realists such as Alejo Carpentier and Miguel Angel Asturias studied with the surrealists, and surrealism, as an international movement, influenced many aspects of Latin American art. Surrealists, however, try to discover and portray that which is above or superior to the ?real? through the use of techniques such as automatic writing, hypnosis, and dreaming. Magical realists, on the other hand, portray the real world itself as having marvelous aspects inherent in it.
• Fantasy and Science fiction ? Fantasy and science fiction novels - using strict definitions - portray an alternate world with its own set of rules and characteristics or experiment with our world by suggesting how a new technology or political system might affect our society. Magical realism, however, portrays the real world as not satisfying any definite set of rules. Some critics include Magic Realism as one of the Fantasy genres, though. This genre is classical 'edge' genre, both fitting and not fitting Fantasy, depending of used definitions.