Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Critics generally acknowledge that postcolonial literature produced outside Europe and white North America has generated one literary mode not found previously elsewhere: magic realism. Magic realism combines fantasy and realism but does not treat the two as distinct realms – as, for instance, the Gothic does – but rather blurs the lines between them. The new mode is global in scope: Gabriel García Márquez from Colombia, Salman Rushdie from India, Ben Okri from Nigeria, and Toni Morrison, the African American novelist, all have written magic realism. As the name suggests, magic realism defines itself against realism, the mode associated with the novel as it developed in Europe (and especially France) during the nineteenth century. Realism emphasizes mimesis, the imitation of the world outside the text. It adheres to verisimilitude, a conformity to the ordinary and the probable, especially in terms of psychology, and values careful observation and the telling fact: for example, the small detail of a character's home, dress, gait, or speech that reveals class and positioning within a web of social relations. What matters about a character is how he or she has been shaped by society. Elizabeth Ermarth (1983) has compared literary realism to pictorial realism, associated with the development of perspective in the Renaissance. Realism values an objectivity that is not to be confused ... log in or subscribe to read full text