Um, is it just us, or are "magic" and "realism" two things that don't seem like they should go together?

 Um, is it just us, or are "magic" and "realism" two things that don't seem like they should go together?

Well, okay, maybe that seems like a strange combination, but strange combinations are just what makes Magic Realist writers tick. They love to depict the mundane, everyday world we know all too well—but then they inject it with some fantasy as if fantasy were the most normal thing in the world.

Open up a Magic Realist novel, for example, and sure, you'll find lots of descriptions of regular people just like you and me doing everyday, regular things like washing the dishes, setting the snooze button the alarm, and Shmooping Magic Realism. But turn the page, and these same people are likely to grow wings and fly, or turn into an animal, or move between the world of the living and between the world of the dead.

Magic Realism is defined by contradiction. On the one hand, it draws on the Realist tradition in literature, which was all about depicting the world as we see it, with all its everyday details and all its many problems. But on the other hand, Magic Realism fills this Realist world with the fantastic, the extraordinary, and the supernatural. It's a literary movement that jumbles together the fantastic and the mundane, and by doing so, it shows how life, even at its most trivial, can get pretty fantastic pretty quickly.

After all, life can be pretty weird now and then, right? Sometimes just acknowledging that weirdness is more realistic than pretending it doesn't exist.

While Magic Realism has its roots in older literary movements like Realism, it only really exploded on a global scale beginning in the 1960s, when a number of Latin American writers began pushing the envelope by challenging the bounds of what we consider to be reality—often with political as well as artistic aims. Don't think fantasy can be political? Read on to find out how these magicians did it.