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Roh to refer to a painterly style also known as Neue Sachlichkeit (the New
Objectivity)[2]. It was later used to describe the unusual realism by American
painters such as Ivan Albright, Paul Cadmus, George Tooker and other artists
during the 1940s and 1950s. However, in contrast to its use in literature,
when used to describe visual art, the term refers to paintings that do not
include anything fantastic or magical, but are rather extremely realistic and
often mundane.
Two of the major critical and commercial successes of Magic Realism are The
House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende[4]; and One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel García Márquez, both bestsellers [5],[6]. One Hundred Years of
Solitude is widely considered the master work of the genre and perhaps the
novel that has most shaped world literature over the past 25 years[7]. Gabriel
García Márquez, Nobel Laureate and author of One Hundred Years of
Solitude, confessed, "My most important problem was destroying the line of
demarcation that separates what seems real from what seems fantastic." [8]
Although the term was first applied to literature of Latin America, it has
become popular among English language writers as well. As recently as 2008,
magical realism in literature has been defined as "a kind of modern fiction in
which fabulous and fantastical events are included in a narrative that
otherwise maintains the 'reliable' tone of objective realistic report.
Designating a tendency of the modern novel to reach beyond the confines of
realism and draw upon the energies of fable, folk tale, and myth while
maintaining a strong contemporary social relevance. The fantastic attributes
given to characters in such novels—levitation, flight, telepathy, telekinesis—
are among the means that magic realism adopts in order to encompass the
often phantasmagoric political realities of the 20th century."[11]