Magic realism Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Jennifer Andrews

Critical Essay by Jennifer Andrews

SOURCE: “Rethinking the Relevance of Magic Realism for English-Canadian Literature: Reading Ann-Marie MacDonald's Fall on Your Knees,” in Studies in Canadian Literature, Vol. 24, No. 1, 1999, pp. 1-19.

In the following essay, Andrews argues for a revision of definitions of magic realism in Canadian literature based on Ann-Marie MacDonald's lesbian feminist novel Fall on Your Knees.

Magic realism remains a vexed concept for Canadian literature, despite having been adopted to describe a specific group of English-Canadian texts, including Robert Kroetsch's What the Crow Said and Jack Hodgins's The Invention of the World. Traditionally, magic realism has referred to Latin America fiction. Thus, this transplanting of magic realism to a Canadian context created a series of debates during the 1970s and 1980s regarding definitions of the phrase, its applicability to English-language works produced in regions outside of “the third world,” and the relationship of magic realism to other critical frameworks,...
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