magic realism

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

a literary and artistic mode in which magical or supernatural elements are presented as a natural, unremarkable part of an otherwise realistic narrative world, without the explanatory frameworks of fantasy or science fiction; associated primarily with Latin American writers including Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, and Laura Esquivel, magic realism has been understood as a response to the specific historical and cultural conditions of post-colonial societies in which indigenous cosmologies, colonial histories, and modern rationalism coexist in productive tension; the mode has been traced to the German art critic Franz Roh's 1925 coinage and to the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier's concept of lo real maravilloso — the marvellous real — and has spread to African, South Asian, and Eastern European literatures where it serves as a vehicle for narrating historical trauma, spiritual experience, and cultural hybridity outside the conventions of European literary realism