A Companion to Magical Realism


Book Description

The Companion to Magical Realism provides an assessment of the world-wide impact of a movement which was incubated in Germany, flourished in Latin America and then spread to the rest of the world. It provides a set of up-to-date assessments of the work of writers traditionally associated with magical realism such as Gabriel Garc a M rquez in particular his recently published memoirs], Alejo Carpentier, Miguel ngel Asturias, Juan Rulfo, Isabel Allende, Laura Esquivel and Salman Rushdie, as well as bringing into the fold new authors such as W.B. Yeats, Seamus Heaney, Jos Saramago, Dorit Rabinyan, Ovid, Mar a Luisa Bombal, Ibrahim al-Kawni, Mayra Montero, Nakagami Kenji, Jos Eustasio Rivera and Elias Khoury, discussed for the first time in the context of magical realism. Written in a jargon-free style, and with all quotations translated into English, this book offers a refreshing new interdisciplinary slant on magical realism as an international literary phenomenon emerging from the trauma of colonial dispossession. The companion also has a Guide to Further Reading. Stephen Hart is Professor of Hispanic Studies, University College London and Doctor Honoris Causa of the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Lima, Peru. Wen-chin Ouyang lectures in Arabic Literature and Comparative Literature at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. CONTRIBUTORS: Jonathan Allison, Michael Berkowitz, John D. Erickson, Robin Fiddian, Evelyn Fishburn, Stephen M. Hart, David Henn, Stephanie Jones, Julia King, Efra n Kristal, Mark Morris, Humberto N ez-Faraco, Wen-Chin Ouyang, Lois Parkinson Zamora, Helene Price, Tsila A. Ratner, Kenneth Reeds, Alejandra Rengifo, Lorna Robinson, Sarah Sceats, Donald L. Shaw, Stefan Sperl, Philip Swanson, Jason Wilson.




Magical Realism and Literature


Book Description

Magical realism can lay claim to being one of most recognizable genres of prose writing. It mingles the probable and improbable, the real and the fantastic, and it provided the late-twentieth century novel with an infusion of creative energy in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and beyond. Writers such as Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, Salman Rushdie, Ben Okri, and many others harnessed the resources of narrative realism to the representation of folklore, belief, and fantasy. This book sheds new light on magical realism, exploring in detail its global origins and development. It offers new perspectives of the history of the ideas behind this literary tradition, including magic, realism, otherness, primitivism, ethnography, indigeneity, and space and time.




Magical Realism


Book Description

On magical realism in literature




Magical Realism and Beyond


Book Description




Dragon and Soldier


Book Description

Dragon and Thief, the first novel in the Dragonback series from Timothy Zahn, was named an American Library Association Best Book For Young Adults. The second novel, Dragon and Soldier is another fast-paced, compulsively readable SF adventure featuring an odd couple of reluctant partners on an unusual quest. Draycos, a golden-scaled draconic K'da poet-warrior, was on a scout fleet ship when it was attacked, with him the lone survivor. Forced to find a new symbiotic humanoid host, he found Jack Morgan. Jack has been on his own, making his way by shipping interstellar cargo on the ship he's inherited from his Uncle Virgil, a con-man and thief who met with a fatal accident. Draycos has vowed to uncover those behind a vast conspiracy to wipe out his people, while Jack is determined to find out who framed him for a crime he didn't commit. Virgil, who survives as "Uncle Virge" in the ship's computer, is against their plan. But Draycos once saved Jack's life, so Jack feels an obligation to this strange creature who can slip onto the boy's skin, pressing against it like a living tattoo. Knowing that mercenaries were involved in the ambush that killed Draycos's fleet, Jack enlists in a mercenary outfit that practically enslaves adolescent recruits. But the soldier's life isn't exactly what Jack had bargained for, especially when a mysterious girl is recruited into his group. Strange things are happening, and people and events are not always as they seem. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.




Moments of Magical Realism in US Ethnic Literatures


Book Description

A collection of essays that explores magical realism as a momentary interruption of realism in US ethnic literature, showing how these moments of magic realism serve to memorialize, address, and redress traumatic ethnic histories.




Rediscovering Magical Realism in the Americas


Book Description

Drawing from a variety of contemporary literature—including such works as One Hundred Years of Solitude, Beloved, and Like Water for Chocolate—Schroeder explores magical realism as one of many common denominators in the literature of the Americas, challenging the notion that magical realism should be defined merely in terms of geography or Latin American history. By relying on an all-encompassing vision of this unique mode of writing, the author argues that the Americas share a literary tradition and validates the North American strain of the mode. In addition, she points to fundamentally similar approaches to fiction that illustrate the ways in which the Americas share a common literature and calls for increased Pan-American scholarship. Counteracting the critical tendency to label anything unreal or supernatural in literature as magical realism, Schroeder traces the mode through a variety of contemporary works, including well-known and lesser-known examples. Through a carefully articulated history and description of the mode itself, she is able to show that while Latin American and North American fiction share in common certain features of magical realism, their distinctive approaches to it reflect Latin America's third-world concerns and North America's preoccupation with popular culture and capitalism. Tracing the forces of change at work on the mode in an effort to counter the tendency among scholars to apply the label without justification, this book reclaims magical realism as a current and significant term for use in its application to literary works.




Climate and Crises


Book Description

Climate and Crises: Magical Realism as Environmental Discourse makes a dual intervention in both world literature and ecocriticism by examining magical realism as an international style of writing that has long-standing links with environmental literature. The book argues that, in the era of climate change when humans are facing the prospect of species extinction, new ideas and new forms of expression are required to address what the novelist Amitav Gosh calls a "crisis of imagination." Magical realism enables writers to portray alternative intellectual paradigms, ontologies and epistemologies that typically contest the scientific rationalism derived from the European Enlightenment, and the exploitation of natural resources associated with both capitalism and imperialism. Climate and Crises explores the overlaps between magical realism and environmental literature, including their respective transgressive natures that dismantle binaries (such as human and non-human), a shared biocentric perspective that focuses on the inter-connectedness of all things in the universe, and, frequently, a critique of postcolonial legacies in formerly colonised territories. The book also challenges conventional conceptions of magical realism, arguing they are often influenced by a geographic bias in the construction of the orthodox global canon, and instead examines contemporary fiction from Asia (including China) and Australasia, two regions that have been largely neglected by scholarship of the narrative mode. As a result, the monograph modifies and expands our ideas of what magical realist fiction is.




Magical Realism and the Postcolonial Novel


Book Description

This book rethinks the origins and nature of magical realism and provides detailed readings of key novels by Asturias, Carpentier, García Márquez, Rushdie, and Okri. Identifying two different strands of the mode, one characterized by faith, the other by irreverence, Warnes makes available a new vocabulary for the discussion of magical realism.




Jolts


Book Description

'Unsparing, funny and compelling.These stories will surprise and startle.' – Wendy Erskine A return — this seems to be one of the things I'm expected to write about. And now that I return, now that I find myself here, I haven't even left the airport and I'm already toying with the idea of writing a return, perhaps just to surrender. Nine stories. Nine ways of not being at home. Nine confrontations to the limits of fiction and memoir. Jolts is a playful and honest exploration of the joys and sorrows of lives lived in-between places. A collection that travels across time, space, and language, in order to deliver the gospel of the Latin American short story. '...an author who is a sharp observer and fearless explorer.' – PANK Magazine