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What is Magical Realism?

MSt, Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies (University of Oxford)


Date Published: 14.03.2023,

Last Updated: 24.01.2024

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Defining Magical Realism

Magical realism — related to and sometimes conflated with magic realism, marvelous realism, and magico realism — is a term used to describe literature in which supernatural or magical elements coexist with the ordinary and the mundane. As Louis Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris write in their introduction to Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, in magical realist texts,

The supernatural is not a simple or obvious matter, but it is an ordinary matter, an everyday occurrence — admitted, accepted, and integrated into the rationality and materiality of literary realism. Magic is no longer quixotic madness, but normative and normalizing. It is a simple matter of the most complicated sort. (1995)

Magical Realism book cover
Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community

Lois Parkinson Zamora, Wendy B. Faris

The supernatural is not a simple or obvious matter, but it is an ordinary matter, an everyday occurrence — admitted, accepted, and integrated into the rationality and materiality of literary realism. Magic is no longer quixotic madness, but normative and normalizing. It is a simple matter of the most complicated sort. (1995)

While the term magical realism seems to emphasize the dichotomy between its elements (magic and reality), magical realism would not view itself as oxymoronic. Within magical realism, Zamora and Faris write, “magic may be real, reality magical; there is no need to label them as such” (1995). 

Magical realism is difficult to concisely define thanks to the term’s complicated origins (discussed later in this guide) and disagreement over its status as a genre, mode, or form of writing — or, more broadly, a concept of reality. Magical realism is probably best described as a literary or narrative mode. Amaryll Beatrice Chanady distinguishes “genre” from “mode” in Magical Realism and the Fantastic,

In the case of literary genres, the reading codes [interpretive rules for the reader] are usually well defined, and allow the reader to react to a text such as a comedy or a tragedy in a certain way. Literary modes, on the other hand, can often overlap, and are found in different genres. (1985, [2019])

Magical Realism and the Fantastic book cover
Magical Realism and the Fantastic: Resolved versus Unresolved Antinomy

Amaryll Beatrice Chanady

In the case of literary genres, the reading codes [interpretive rules for the reader] are usually well defined, and allow the reader to react to a text such as a comedy or a tragedy in a certain way. Literary modes, on the other hand, can often overlap, and are found in different genres. (1985, [2019])

Within the mode of magical realism, several critics have aimed to distinguish between two strands. Although magical realism has strong roots in Latin American literature (see the “Origins of Magical Realism” section further down), the mode is employed by writers from across the globe. While geographical generalizations are not always helpful in literary analysis, Fardis proposes there is some utility in recognizing “a tropical lush and northerly spare variety” of the plant that is magical realism, the former’s magic tending to be pervasive and omnipresent while the latter’s magic is more often programmatic and circumscribed. 

Jean Weisgerber separates magical realism into a “scholarly type,” which loses itself in the attempt to illuminate or construct a speculative universe (mainly written by European authors), and a mythic or folkloric type mainly found in Latin America. Roberto González Echevarría divides magical realism into two types: the epistemological, in which the marvels result from the character (their vision or relationship with something else), and the ontological, in which the place itself (America, specifically) is marvelous. 

These categories are worth considering as we think about the forms magical realism can take, but they are unstable and often hard to distinguish. This indefinability suits magical realism. As Zaomra and Faris write, magical realism is “a mode suited to exploring — and transgressing — boundaries, whether the boundaries are ontological, political, geographical, or generic” (1995).


Key Elements of Magical Realism

Faris offers this succinct definition of magical realism in the book chapter “Scheherazade's Children: Magical Realism and Postmodern Fiction”:  

Very briefly, magical realism combines realism and the fantastic in such a way that magical elements grow organically out of the reality portrayed. (1995)

She provides a list of five primary characteristics of magical realism:

  1. There is an irreducible element of magic that cannot be explained by rational laws of the universe — and it “really” happens in the text. The magic refuses to be assimilated into or dismissed by realism and often disrupts logic and order. Magical elements and logical reversals make reality as we know it seem amazing or ridiculous because “the reactions of ordinary people to these magical events reveal behaviors that we recognize and that disturb us” (1995). Magic can thus be used for the purposes of satire or political commentary.

  2. Detailed descriptions create a fictional world that resembles our own, and they demonstrate the strong presence of the phenomenal within it. This attention to sensory detail is a continuation of the realist tradition. But when such detail is applied to magical phenomena, it frees a style of detailed, realist writing from needing to reflect “real life.” Actual historical events are often woven into magical realism in unexpected and specific ways, and objects take on a life of their own, reappearing and gradually accumulating meaning.

  3. The reader is positioned between two contradictory understandings of events, potentially causing unsettling doubts. Faris cites Todorov’s understanding of the fantastic, which is found when a reader hesitates between the uncanny (when an event can be explained according to the known laws of the universe) and the marvelous (which requires an alteration to those laws). Is the event a hallucination or a miracle? This hesitation is a tricky element in magical realism: it disturbs the irreducible element of magic, and some readers hesitate more than others. 

  4. There is a closeness or near-merging of two realms. Magical realism takes place at an intersection of two worlds, fantasy and reality, so it often transgresses other seemingly fixed categories like life and death, fact and fiction. 

  5. Received ideas about time, space, and identity are questioned. The reader’s sense of time and space is unmoored by magical realist texts. The concept of the “subject” — in fiction, in history, in life — is interrogated, a contestation which Faris believes is more convincing “because it comes from within”: “the magic contests but it contests from within a realistically rendered historical fiction and a realistically conceived character,” even as it questions those very ideas (1995).

Other characteristics of magical realism which are common but less core to defining the mode include: 

  • metafictional elements
  • “verbal magic” — metaphors made real, intertextual play
  • an almost childlike matter-of-factness
  • repetitions, mirroring, and reversals
  • metamorphoses
  • magic as resistance to the established social order
  • critiques of totalitarian regimes
  • incorporation of ancient belief systems or local folklore
  • rural settings (though there are significant magical realist works set in cities)
  • a Jungian rather than Freudian perspective — the magic seems to emanate from a sense of collective relatedness rather than individual memories, dreams, or visions
  • a carnivalesque spirit and a sense of excess

With these key elements in mind, we can now explore magical realism in greater depth.


Magical Realism and Realism

Magical realism responds to another literary mode: realism. Although the idea that art should mirror reality dates back to Aristotle's writing on mimesis, or imitation, realism emerged as a term in literary criticism during the mid-nineteenth century. Its principles arise from the conviction of Enlightenment philosophers like Descartes and Locke that reality’s truths are discoverable through reason and rational inquiry. Realism as a literary mode is most associated with novels of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries that aimed to represent life as it “truly” was, to depict realistic characters and situations within a recognizable world that mirrors the reality of their readers. 

Some critics, including Catherine Belsey in Critical Practice, argue that realism’s “truth” or “recognizability” lies not in the world it depicts but in how it depicts that world. Belsey writes, “Realism is plausible not because it reflects the world, but because it is constructed out of what is (discursively) familiar” (1980, [2003]). It is this approach that realism and magical realism share: magical realism presents extraordinary and marvelous events as if they were real, constructing a narrative that provides a realistic context for unreal elements. As Maggie Ann Bowers writes in Magic(al) Realism:

Magical realism therefore relies upon realism but only so that it can stretch what is acceptable as real to its limits. (2004)

Magic(al) Realism book cover
Magic(al) Realism

Maggie Ann Bowers

Magical realism therefore relies upon realism but only so that it can stretch what is acceptable as real to its limits. (2004)

Magical realism does not simply stretch realism; it rebels against it. Literary realism operates with a universalizing impulse, intending its “objective” depiction to stand as a singular version of nature, society, reality — in short, as Zamora and Faris write, “realism functions ideologically and hegemonically” (1995). Magical realism also “functions ideologically” but “less hegemonically,” creating “space for interactions of diversity” through a program that is “not centralizing but eccentric”:

In magical realist texts, ontological disruption serves the purpose of political and cultural disruption: magic is often given as a cultural corrective, requiring readers to scrutinize accepted realistic conventions of causality, materiality, motivation. (1995)

Magical realism thus shares with the realist mode an investment in exploring the nature of reality and its depiction. At the same time, magical realism resists the basic assumptions held by literary realism and post-Enlightenment rationalism. Writers often use magical realism to counter dominant narratives developed in Europe and thrust upon the world, represented by the realist novel. Through magical realism, writers can recuperate “non-Western” worldviews and forms of storytelling, self-consciously departing from European traditions of prose writing, geographical settings, and stereotypes of the irrational or mystic as “primitive,” “effeminate,” and “unenlightened.” 


Magical Realism versus Surrealism, Fantasy, Science Fiction, and the Fantastic

To clarify what magical realism is, it is helpful to understand what it is not. We have already discussed what distinguishes magical realism from realism, but magical realism is not the only mode/genre of literature which resists realist impulses. 

In Alejo Carpentier’s essay “On the Marvelous Real in America” (1967, [1995]), a foundational text in the development of magical realism, he distinguishes the “marvelous real” from other genres incorporating the magical and extraordinary, including Surrealism. (Largely, the marvelous real is considered to be an early theorization of magical realism, though Bowers addresses this relationship in more depth and distinguishes the two terms in Magic(al) Realism.) 

Predating magical realism, Surrealism also reimagined standards of realism in both art and literature. After World War I shattered a sense of the world as rational and ordered, the surrealists turned to unbelievable images and occurrences in their art. Carpentier describes how the surrealists “manufactured” the marvelous “by tricks of prestidigitation, by juxtaposing objects unlikely ever to be found together” (1967, [1995]). In other words, the magical elements of Surrealism felt forced, intentionally chosen in order to create a sense of shock or disbelief. 

Carpentier felt Surrealism was constructed and formulaic: “The result of willing the marvelous or any other trance is that the dream technicians become the bureaucrats” (1967, [1995]). Magical realism, on the other hand, drew upon magic that was not manufactured but latent, raw, and omnipresent, especially in America. 

Faris explains that magical realism is part of Surrealism’s legacy, inheriting its defiance of realism and logic, its exploitation of the “fullest magic of metaphor,” and its sense of “defamiliarization” (1995). “However,” she continues,

In contrast to the magical images constructed by Surrealism out of ordinary objects, which aim to appear virtually unmotivated and thus programmatically resist interpretation, magical realist images, while projecting a similar initial aura of surprising craziness, tend to reveal their motivations — psychological, social, emotional, political — after some scrutiny. (1995)

Bowers points to another key difference between Surrealism and magical realism: while Surrealism often concerns itself with dreams, magical realism rarely presents the extraordinary through “a psychological experience because to do so takes the magic out of recognizable material reality and places it into the little understood world of the imagination. The ordinariness of magical realism’s magic relies on its accepted and unquestioned position in tangible and material reality” (2004). 

Magical realism is also distinguished from two other genres employing marvelous elements, fantasy and science fiction. In works of fantasy, the world we encounter is separate from our own, built on its own structures and conventions of reality. Magic appears everywhere; it is part of the world and never seems out of place. In works of science fiction, as Chanady writes, the extraordinary is also integrated into the larger order of the text, but the work’s “norms of logic are based on existing scientific discoveries and theories. [...] What would obviously be regarded as supernatural in a different context, is considered normal in the world of science fiction” (1985, [2019]).

In works of magical realism, the world resembles our own but punctuated by seemingly incongruous marvelous elements. These elements are often treated matter-of-factly, present as realist occurrences even as they are clearly extraordinary.

Magical realism is often discussed in conversation with another literary mode incorporating marvelous elements into an otherwise realist world: the fantastic. Critics disagree about the extent to which magical realism and the fantastic overlap. Neil Cornwell argues in The Literary Fantastic: From Gothic to Postmodernism that, in works utilizing the fantastic, marvelous elements are presented by the narrator to the reader as extraordinary events within a realist tale; in a magical realist interpretation, these elements are presented as ordinary within a realist story. In her study of the fantastic and magical realism, Chanady differentiates the two modes in this way: “In contrast to the fantastic, the supernatural in magical realism does not disconcert the reader [...]. The same phenomena that are portrayed as problematical by the author of a fantastic narrative are presented in a matter-of-fact manner by the magical realist” (1985, [2019]).

Because the magical elements are presented as ordinary occurrences, the readers are encouraged to accept the phenomena at face value. On the other hand, Tzvetan Todorov defines the fantastic by its ability to elicit a constant waffling between belief and nonbelief in the reader: is this event supernatural, or is there a logical explanation? This indeterminacy produces an unsettled feeling in the reader and the characters; the protagonist is often surprised or terrified. The fantastic interrupts realism and reason by puncturing it with the abnormal and keeping the reader questioning; magical realism similarly resists realism and reason, but by presenting similarly abnormal events without question. 

This precise differentiation is contested within the scholarship. As we see in the “Key Elements of Magical Realism” section below, Faris lists the element of doubt as one key element in magical realism, interpreting the fantastic as a tool that can be used by magical realism.

In order to further illustrate the differences between these literary modes, a series of examples may be helpful.

In a fantasy novel, an otherwise human person with large wings would likely be presented as a particular type of creature found in the novel’s world — like faeries in Sarah J. Maas’ A Court of Thorns and Roses series. In a science fiction novel, the wings could be explained as the result of scientific experimentation — such as in James Patterson’s Maximum Ride series.

In magical realism, the appearance of a person with wings seems out of place in a world that otherwise resembles ours. Take Gabriel García Márquez's short story “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” (1968). A married couple, Pelayo and Elisenda, find a winged man lying in their backyard. Although they are at first startled by his appearance, they “soon overc[o]me their surprise and in the end [find] him familiar” (1968). The characters search for an explanation and conclude that the man must be an angel, though the parish priest finds him “much too human: he had an unbearable smell of the outdoors, the back side of his wings was strewn with parasites and his main feathers had been mistreated by terrestrial winds, and nothing about him measured up to the proud dignity of angels” (1968). 

In this short story, we see the way magical realism presents the marvelous materially and matter-of-factly: there really is a man with wings in Pelayo and Elisenda’s house. The story lingers on realist elements — the bureaucratic process of determining if the man is an angel, the physical details of his haggard appearance, the worldly motivations of Pelayo and Elisenda, who make money off those visiting the supposed angel. The old man becomes something material and recognizable even if he is understood as extraordinary. He is treated “as if he weren’t a supernatural creature but a circus animal” (1968). This short story is thus more in the mode of the magical realist than the fantastic, if the terms are viewed as separate. We are not disturbed by the fact that this extraordinary figure is in a realist world; we are more disturbed by how he is treated.


The History of Magical Realism

Although the term magical realism was first used in the twentieth century, one can argue that magical realism attempts to reconnect with a style of writing predating realism’s dominance in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Zamora and Faris endow magical realism with a long history, “beginning with the masterful interweavings of magical and real in the epic and chivalric traditions and continuing in the precursors of modern prose fiction — the Decameron, The Thousand and One Nights, Don Quixote” (1995). They continue:

Indeed, we may suppose that the widespread appeal of magical realist fiction today responds not only to its innovative energy but also to its impulse to reestablish contact with traditions temporarily eclipsed by the mimetic constraints of nineteenth- and twentieth-century realism. (1995)

The term “magical realism” was first introduced by the German art critic Franz Roh. Aiming to describe the new style of Post-Expressionist painting, he deployed the term Magischer Realismus (usually translated “magic realism”), though he never provided a concise definition. In his 1925 publication Nach-Expressionismus, Magischer Realismus: Probleme der neuesten Europaïschen Malerei (Post-Expressionism, Magical Realism: Problems of the Newest European Painting), Roh describes the goals of magic realist painting: “To depict realistically is not to portray or copy but rather to build rigorously, to construct objects that exist in the world in their primordial shape” (1925, [1995]). Magic realist artists depict “a purified world, a referential world” coldly, statically, meticulously (1925, [1995]). They believe that, through an attention to the exteriors of objects, the juxtaposition of near and far, and the depiction of things minute and infinite, a spiritual understanding of reality can be captured.

In the preface to his book, Roh writes that he chose the word “magic” rather than “mystic” to “indicate that the mystery does not descend to the represented world, but rather hides and palpitates behind it” (1925, [1995]). Although the style of magic realist art seems disparate from the literary mode of magical realism, this idea of magic palpitating behind the represented world shares something with magical realism’s approach to literature.

At the same time that Roh described Post-Expressionist painting with the term magic realist, German museum director Gustav Harlaub used the term Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity). It was Harlaub’s term that largely stuck and eventually subsumed magic realism. 

Alejo Carpentier was the first to describe the literary movement that would become magical realism, using the term lo real maravilloso (the marvelous real). In his writings and lectures, Carpentier emphasized the particularly American nature of the marvelous real, distinguished from European Surrealism. Rather than following a manifesto or constructed artistic goal, the American marvelous real amplified reality as it truly appeared in Latin American nature and culture; it captured a true, rather than manufactured, mystery.

For Carpentier the marvelous real emerges from the very history, geography, and folklore of Latin America. He points to Latin America’s lush vegetation, continued appreciation for the ritual of folk dancing, hybridity of mixed races and ethnicities, and extraordinary historical events, “from those who searched for the fountain of eternal youth and the golden city of Manoa to certain early rebels or modern heroes of mythological fame from our wars of independence” (1949, [1995]). When the conquerors encountered America, they could not find the words to describe what they had seen. Carpenter writes, “to understand and interpret this new world, a new vocabulary was needed, not to mention — because you can’t have one without the other — a new optic” (1975, [1995]): “Here the strange is commonplace, and always was commonplace” (1949, [1995]).

The concept of “magical realism” became fully realized by the critic Angel Flores in his 1955 essay “Magical Realism in Spanish American Fiction.” Both Carpentier and Flores root magical realism in Latin America, and many of the writers considered innovators of the mode have Latin American origins — Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Isabel Angélica Allende Llona, to name only a few.

Since the 1950s, magical realism has continued to develop and critics have grappled with the difficulty of defining the mode as it spread throughout the globe and took new forms. It has become a truly global literary mode; other writers often associated with magical realism or interpreted through that lens include Salman Rushdie, Milan Kundera, Haruki Murakami, Toni Morrison, and Ana Castillo. 


Magical Realism Examples: One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Satanic Verses

Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988) are two of the most significant works of magical realism.

One Hundred Years of Solitude is considered a core text of the Latin American literary “boom” of the 1960s and ’70s, an exemplary work of magical realism, and one of the most widely acclaimed novels of all time. The novel takes place in a small village resembling the writer’s hometown, Aracataca. Many of the book’s events are based on historical fact, such as the 1928 workers strike of the United Fruit Company and the Thousand Days’ War, a Colombian civil war that took place between October 1899 and November 1902. Within this reality resembling our own, supernatural elements manifest — the village priest levitates when he drinks hot chocolate, a traveler transforms into a puddle of tar, flowers rain when a character dies. The story has a mythic quality common in works of magical realism. 

The Satanic Verses is another significant work of magical realism, not only for its literary merit but also for the vehement response it provoked. Rushdie’s novel interweaves the story of Saladin and Gibreel, Indian expatriates to England whose lives are transformed after they survive the hijacking of a plane, with an imaginary account of the early days of Islam. The novel features visions depicting the life of the prophet Muhammad, a peasant girl, and a contemporary imam. The book references the Satanic Verses of the Quran: legend says that three verses were spoken to Muhammad but later withdrawn on the grounds that they were actually spoken by the devil under the guise of God. 

The book’s references to the Satanic Verses and unorthodox incorporations of Muslim names and religious figures were seen by some as blasphemous. In 1989, Ruhollah Khomeini, Supreme Leader of Iran whom Rushdie parodied in his novel, issued a fatwa, or a binding legal ruling, for Rushdie’s assassination. Numerous killings, attempted killings (including against Rushdie himself), and bombings were perpetrated by extremists outraged by the book and its perceived dishonoring of Muhammad and Islam.


Magical Realism and Postmodernism

Both magical realism and postmodernism have similar histories as terms in criticism. Each only gained wide usage in the 1960s and were applied to artistic movements in the 1980s. Both are often used to describe literature, but have expanded beyond those bounds to describe other works of art and even perspectives on reality. Both are terms that are frequently used by critics while evading precise definition, accumulating meanings and attributions to the point where critics question their utility.

Theo L. D’haen argues (in “Magical Realism and Postmodernism: Decentering Privileged Centers”) that the following features are characteristic of postmodernism: self-reflexiveness, metafiction, eclecticism, redundancy, multiplicity, discontinuity, intertextuality, parody, the dissolution of character and narrative instance, the erasure of boundaries, and the destabilization of the reader. All of these features are also commonly seen in magical realism, allying the mode with the postmodernist impulse.

For D’haen, magical realism is part of postmodernism, particularly because of the sense that magical realism does not speak from a privileged center for culture or politics: “It is precisely the notion of the ex-centric, in the sense of speaking from the margin from a place ‘other’ than ‘the’ or ‘a’ center, that seems to me an essential feature of that strain of postmodernism we call magic realism” (1995). Magical realism attempts to break from a literary tradition “starting with realism and running via naturalism and modernism” to a kind of postmodernist writing that, subversive as it might seem to the movement before it, still originates from a “privileged center” (1995).

D’haen argues that magical realism appropriates the techniques of the “center” (such as realist description) and then uses them,

Not, as in the case of these central movements, ‘realistically,’ that is, to duplicate existing reality as perceived by the theoretical or philosophical tenets underlying said [central] movements, but rather to create an alternative world correcting so-called existing reality, and thus to right the wrongs this ‘reality’ depends upon. Magical realism thus reveals itself as a ruse to invade and take over dominant discourse(s). (1995)

Magical Realism book cover
Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community

Lois Parkinson Zamora, Wendy B. Faris

Not, as in the case of these central movements, ‘realistically,’ that is, to duplicate existing reality as perceived by the theoretical or philosophical tenets underlying said [central] movements, but rather to create an alternative world correcting so-called existing reality, and thus to right the wrongs this ‘reality’ depends upon. Magical realism thus reveals itself as a ruse to invade and take over dominant discourse(s). (1995)

Magical realism is a tool for writers who do not speak from privileged centers to “access the main body of ‘Western’ literature” while avoiding “the adoption of the views of hegemonic forces together with their discourse” (1995). At the same time, writers speaking from those privileged centers can diverge from those discourses of power. D’haen discusses specific magical realist novels that directly respond to or rewrite colonist, misogynist, oppressive narratives, like J.M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986) — which rewrites Robinson Crusoe through the perspective of a woman shipwrecked on the island and centers Friday’s story — and Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (1984) — which references Homeric myths, particularly the rape of Leda by Zeus in the form of a swan. Both novels utilize magical realism to resist the way stories of women and “non-Western” peoples have historically been told in “Western” literature.

For D’haen, the cutting edge of postmodernism is magical realism because it blends the boundaries between and ultimately subverts the possible and impossible, reality and parody, fact and fiction, relevant and irrelevant. By questioning realism through the techniques of realism, magical realism disrupts hegemonic narratives — the ways we tell stories, who we tell them about, and what they tell us. Magical realism not only shocks the realist system with the appearance of the fantastical or unusual, but it causes us to consider how our own reality is itself marvelous and extraordinary, home to unimaginable horrors, mind-boggling absurdities, and fantastic miracles. 

Magical Realism FAQs

Further Reading on Perlego

The Palgrave Handbook of Magical Realism in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Richard Perez and Victoria A. Chevalier

Magical Realism and Cosmopolitanism: Strategizing Belonging by Kim Sasser

Magical Realism and the Postcolonial Novel: Between Faith and Irreverence by Christopher Warnes

Magical Realism in Postcolonial British Fiction: History, Nation, and Narration by Taner Can

Magical Realism in West African Fiction by Brenda Cooper

Magical Realism and Deleuze: The Indiscernibility of Difference in Postcolonial Literature by Eva Aldea

Public Health, Humanities and Magical Realism: A Creative-Relational Approach to Researching Human Experience by Marisa de Andrade


Bibliography

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Belsey, C. (2003) Critical Practice. Routledge.

Bowers, M.A. (2004) Magic(al) Realism. Routledge.

Chanady, A.B. (2019) Magical Realism and the Fantastic: Resolved versus Unresolved Antinomy, Routledge.

Cornwell, N. (1990) The Literary Fantastic: From Gothic to Postmodernism. Harvester Wheatsheaf. 

Echevarría, R.G. (1974) “Isla a su Vuelo Fugitiva: Carpentier y el Realismo Magico,” Revista iberoamericana, XL (86), pp. 9–63. Available at: https://scholar.archive.org/work/lgojl3i35zafrbvo7tycrbsmlu/access/wayback/http://revista-iberoamericana.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/Iberoamericana/article/download/2549/2737

García Márquez, G. (1968 [1971]) “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings,. Translated by Gregory Rabassa. Available at: https://www.ndsu.edu/pubweb/~cinichol/CreativeWriting/323/MarquezManwithWings.htm

___. (1967) One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Rushdie, S. (1988) The Satanic Verses. Viking.

Summaries, B. (2019). The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie (Book Analysis). BrightSummaries.com.

Summaries, B. (2016). One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Marquez (Book Analysis). BrightSummaries.com.

Maas, S.J. (2015) A Court of Thorns and Roses. Bloomsbury.

Patterson, J. (2007) The Angel Experiment: A Maximum Ride Novel. Little, Brown & Company.

Weisgerber, J. (1987) Le Réalisme magique: roman, peinture et cinéma. L’age d’homme.

 Zamora, L.P. & Faris, W.B. (1995) Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community. Duke University Press. 

MSt, Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies (University of Oxford)

Paige Elizabeth Allen has a Master’s degree in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from the University of Oxford and a Bachelor’s degree in English from Princeton University. Her research interests include monstrosity, the Gothic tradition, illness in literature and culture, and musical theatre. Her dissertation examined sentient haunted houses through the lenses of posthumanism and queer theory.