Magic Realism, Post-modernism and Toni Morrison

Abstract

The term ‘magic realism’ first came to be widely used in English-speaking culture after the translation, in 1970, of the Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 1967 novel, Cien anos de soledad, One Hundred Years of Solitude. South American critics themselves are not fond of the term, and Norman Thomas de Giovanni, who has translated much of the work of Borges, describes it as a ‘pernicious phrase’, rejected by every South American writer of his acquaintance, and over whose meaning there is no agreement whatsoever.