Magic Realism | Literary Criticism & Book Review

Magic Realism Critical Overview

As a literary movement whose most well-known writers are from Latin America, Magic Realism played an important role in placing Latin-American fiction on the international literary map in the 1960s, particularly in the United States. As Jean- Pierre Durix points out in his book Mimesis, Genres, and Post-Colonial Discourse, the term Magic Realism "came into common usage in the late 1960s, a time when intellectuals and literary critics were often involved in Third-Worldism, civil rights, and anti-imperialism." Propitiously, these same issues are often the underlying themes of many magical realist novels, and thus they were widely read and discussed as significant testimonies that "evoke the process of liberation of oppressed communities." However, it was not just these novelists' politics and commitment to social justice that made their works so well received. In their article, Doris Sommer and George Yúdice claim that Magic Realism's popularity could not be summed...
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