Magical realism

A narrative mode in which extraordinary or supernatural events appear within an otherwise realistic fictional world, treated as ordinary parts of life.

Realism: A mode of representation that depicts recognizable people, settings, and events with attention to ordinary experience. Magical realism keeps realism’s recognizable world while admitting extraordinary events.
Authorial reticence: A narrative technique in which the narrator withholds explanation or judgment about events. Withholding comment lets marvelous events remain unexplained within the story’s realistic world.
Franz Roh: A German art critic who introduced the term “magic realism” in a 1925 discussion of post-expressionist painting. Roh’s term began as a description of visual art before becoming associated with literature.
One Hundred Years of Solitude: Gabriel García Márquez’s 1967 novel tracing the Buendía family and the fictional town of Macondo. Its family history and matter-of-fact wonders became a defining example of the mode.
High fantasy: Fantasy set in an invented world with its own history, geography, and often explicit supernatural systems. Magical realism retains a recognizable world rather than building a separate fantasy realm.
The marvelous: An event, object, or being that exceeds ordinary expectations and may seem supernatural or wondrous. Its presence in everyday settings produces the mode’s defining conjunction.
Unreliable narrator: A narrator whose account is limited, biased, or otherwise unreliable as a representation of events. Magical realism usually does not explain its wonders as errors in a narrator’s perception.
Alejo Carpentier: A Cuban novelist and musicologist who developed the idea of the marvelous real in Latin American culture. His account connected the marvelous to the histories and realities of the Americas.
The Kingdom of This World: Alejo Carpentier’s 1949 novel depicting the Haitian Revolution and its aftermath. Carpentier framed the novel’s historical world through his idea of the marvelous real.
Urban fantasy: Fantasy fiction that places supernatural beings or events in a contemporary urban setting. Urban fantasy typically foregrounds a supernatural system that magical realism leaves unexplained.

Linked from 83 pages