If you look at the Wikipedia page -again, I’m interested in how people commonly use terms-you see works set in rural areas or small towns such as Stephen King’s ‘Salems Lot. Urban fantasy is less fraught although we might question the “urban” modifier. “Surrealist” and “fabulist” are two alternative terms that are often treated as synonyms, although in my reading the former lacks the “realism” half of magical realism and the latter implies a fairy tale style and structure that isn’t always present. But I take a descriptivist approach to literary terminology and (rightly or wrongly) magical realism has become a term applied to writers from around the world. I won’t pretend to be in a position to adjudicate all this. OTOH, there are claims that the term itself is marginalizing-excluding POC authors from the more popular fantasy bookstore section-and many Latinx writers have noted the problematic habit of calling all non-realist literature by Latinx writers “magical realism” even when they are writing something like Gothic horror or high fantasy. Others claim the term should be extended to any non-Western country (even if that country itself was a colonizer, like Japan) or else any author of sufficiently marginalized status from any country. Many argue the term should be reserved only for Latin American writers. Originally coined in German for a style of visual art, in literature it is historically associated with Latin American literature around the Boom Period. Like most literary labels, magical realism is a fraught term. Instead, I’m going to look at what I see as the differences between magical realism and urban fantasy as modes of storytelling. If you want to argue surrealist and magical realist work should be shelved with fantasy, or that fantasy should be shelved with literary fiction, that’s fine. This writer is “really” science fiction, that writer has “transcended” genre, etc. Increasingly, I’m inclined to think less in terms of “genres” than “modes.” Something about genres promotes a partisan mindset where the goal is to “win” by either declaring the superiority of your preferred genre or claiming territory from other genres. Magical realism operates differently, not in the same way yet worse. I’ve heard this a lot and, well, disagree. A few years ago, I was discussing this with a SFF writer who insisted magical realism was really fantasy yet in the same breath mocked it as lazy writing by authors who “don’t think through their worldbuilding.” Suddenly magical realism wasn’t just fantasy by another name but bad fantasy by another name. Especially since this claim often comes with its own snobbery. I read and write SFFH (science fiction, fantasy, and horror) alongside so called “literary fiction.” So I certainly agree many great fantasy-shelved writers have been unfairly overlooked by literary critics.īut if we’re trying to illuminate fiction-to understand how different storytelling styles operate-then the claim that magical realism is simply urban fantasy by another name doesn’t seem right to me. Or as Terry Pratchett once put it, “a polite way of saying you write fantasy.” To the degree this is critiquing artificial barriers to bar certain fantastic fiction from “real literature,” I agree. And there’s a common claim that works in the magical realist/surrealist/fabulist zone are “really just fantasy” for literary snobs. This week, I’ve been mulling a question that came up in some recent literary discussions : isn’t magical realism just urban fantasy by another name?
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