SOURCE: “From Magical Realism to Fairy Tale: Isabel Allende's The Stories of Eva Luna,” in West Virginia University Philolocial Papers, Vols. 42-44, 1997, pp. 103-07.

In the following essay, Buehrer questions whether magic realism has degenerated into fairy tale in Isabel Allende's The Stories of Eva Luna.

While Latin American fiction has undergone a veritable renaissance in this country during the past quarter century, its reputation until quite recently has been restricted to a recognition of that handful of magical realist male novelists, such as Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Carlos Fuentes, whose works were first translated into English during the early 1960s. The apparent dearth of women writers on the Latin American literary scene over the same period may be attributed to several factors, not the least of which include a staunchly patriarchal Euro-American publishing industry and what might be more vaguely called, to...