A beauty queen with green hair; a washerwoman's ascent to the hereafter in mid-clothes-pinning; a man who possesses both a keen political sense and telekinetic powers; a child who indulges in night flights while her household is blissfully slumbering -- do... [more]

A beauty queen with green hair; a washerwoman's ascent to the hereafter in mid-clothes-pinning; a man who possesses both a keen political sense and telekinetic powers; a child who indulges in night flights while her household is blissfully slumbering -- do these fictive elements belong to children's fantasy literature? The answer is both yes and no. They come from a literary movement that first blossomed in 1950s Germany and then took hold in Latin America, where it was christened "Magic Realism" by Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier. The term is intended to encompass both the reality of workaday life and the mythological traditions linked to Latin American geography and history. Magic Realist novelists embroider fantastic elements of fable, folklore, and myth -- symbolic indictments of the crazy-quilt insanity of contemporary politics and normalizing ideologies -- then stitch them seamlessly into a conventional narrative. This conscious, playful interweaving of the surreal and the magical within the traditional adult novel confronts the repression of thought-policed cultures and the oppression of modern aesthetics, both of which deny the power of the imaginative world. This vibrant movement continues to flourish throughout the globe, in works from Gunter Grass's "The Tin Drum" to Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude" to Salman Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses" -- wherever folklore and fable are threatened by an authoritarian, anti-irrational culture. [show less]