SOURCE: “Magic Realism in The White Hotel: Compensatory Vision and the Transformation of Classic Realism,” in Southern Humanities Review, Vol. 20, No. 3, Summer, 1986, pp. 205-19.

In the following essay, Foster maintains that D. M. Thomas's novel The White Hotel “stands at one extreme end” of magic realism and therefore encourages a new critical understanding of the literary and artistic movement.

The title of a recent book on magic realism in painting reads like an urgent appeal to students of twentieth-century culture. As we look back at the wildly jumbled terrain pushed up by all the modern movements in literature and art, suddenly Seymour Menton sends the message, Magic Realism Rediscovered.¹ To judge from Menton's discussion of painting, this concept deserves a place of its own in the historical-typological vocabulary with which we isolate distinctive trends and try to emphasize their main defining features.² Because magic realism refers to an...