magic realism

magic realism primarily Latin American literary movement that arose in the 1960s. The term has been attributed to the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier , who first applied it to Latin-American fiction in 1949. Works of magic realism mingle realistic portrayals of ordinary events and characters with elements of fantasy and myth, creating a rich, frequently disquieting world that is at once familiar and dreamlike. The movement's best-known proponent is the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez , who has used the technique many times, most famously in his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). Other magic realist writers include Guatemala's Miguel Ángel Asturias , Argentina's Julio Cortázar , and Mexico's Carlos Fuentes . Non-Latin American writers whose fiction often employs magic realism include Italo Calvino and Salman Rushdie .

magic realism Twentieth-century literary form, particularly associated with post-1945 Latin American novelists. Interweaving of realistic and fantastical elements characterizes magic realism. Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) is a classic example of the genre.

Magic Realism (Magical Realism). Term coined by the German critic Franz Roh in 1925 to describe the aspect of Neue Sachlichkeit characterized by sharp-focus detail. In the book in which he originated the term—Nach-Expressionismus, Magischer Realismus, Probleme der neuesten Europäischen Malerie (1925)—Roh also included a rather mixed bag of non-German painters as ‘Magic Realists’, among them Miró and Picasso. Subsequently critics have used the term to cover various types of painting in which objects are depicted with photographic naturalism but which because of paradoxical elements or strange juxtapositions convey a feeling of unreality, infusing the ordinary with a sense of mystery. The paintings of Magritte are a prime example. In the English-speaking world the term gained currency with an exhibition entitled ‘American Realists and Magic Realists’ at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1943. The director of the museum, Alfred H. Barr, wrote that the term was ‘sometimes applied to the work of painters who by means of an exact realistic technique try to make plausible and convincing their improbable, dreamlike or fantastic visions’.

The term has been adopted in the field of literary criticism to describe ‘a kind of modern fiction in which fabulous and fantastical events are included in a narrative that otherwise maintains the “reliable” tone of objective realistic report’ (Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, 1990).