Magical Realism

If you are against escape, then, by definition, you are a jailor. C.S.Lewis

What is Magical Realism?
magical realism - BH Rogers

A Beginning
The term “magical realism” was coined by a German art critic, Franz Roh, in the late 1920s for painters trying to show reality in a new way. A Venezuelan literary critic, Uslar Pietri, first applied to it to Latin American literature, but it was when Miguel Angel Asturias used it to describe his novels when he won the Nobel Prize that it really caught on, and then it was “used and abused in the 1960s by just everyone in Latin America” (according to Marcial Souto).

(Someone else notes that in 1926 Massimo Bontempelli used the Italian term “realismo magico” reagrding his book SEPARATIONS. It is unclear [to me] if Roh preceded Bontempelli or vice versa.)

Roh described it as a form in which “our real world re-emerges before our eyes, bathed in the clarity of a new day” (according to Brian Evenson in “Magical Realism,” New York Review of Science Fiction, March 1998).

Note: The terms “magical realism” and “magic realism” are used interchangeably here–and just about everywhere else.