Magical Realism and Cosmopolitanism

"For years, critics have been asking if (and proclaiming that) magical realism is dead. Has this narrative mode, arguably the most important literary movement of the twentieth century, seen its day and become, now, an exhausted and dated form? Magical Realism and Cosmopolitanism emphatically contends that magical realism still has much to offer contemporary readers, critics, and authors. However, it has been unnecessarily limited by hermeneutical approaches that have restricted the form to particular, if significant, historical moments and concerns. Instead, this book argues, magical realism might be re-viewed for its potential to enact a range of potential functionalities. The particular function on which Magical Realism and Cosmopolitanism focuses is magical realism's capacity to construct sociological representations of belonging, a usage she traces closely in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century novels of Ben Okri, Salman Rushdie, Cristina Garcia, and Helen Oyeyemi. In