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Foreword
The literary mode of magical realism continues to thrive worldwide—despite predictions of its extinction. This book contributes to the growing body of critical thought on magical realism, which, beginning with the seminal articles by Stephen Slemon and Edna Aizenberg on magical realism as postcolonial discourse, analyzes the cultural work that magical realism has been doing. And like Anne Hegerfeldt’s recent book, Lies that Tell the Truth, on magical realism in Britain, by integrating postcolonial and metropolitan texts, Eugene Arva’s study shows that magical realism is not only a postcolonial phenomenon but also belongs in meaningful ways to world literature in all cultural contexts, especially those having experienced trauma of one kind or another.
Because magical realism includes fantastical––magical––events, it has occasionally come under fire recently as an escapist genre. In this study, Eugene Arva takes on this accusation and refutes it by showing in considerable theoretical and textual detail how magical realism (in his words) “rewrites the vanishing real,” and thereby makes traumatic events of history, which have been repressed because they were too horrific to