Conceptual and fictional history of magic realism in Brazil

Abstract

ABSTRACT: The literary history of a country is always under revision, in a perennial process of critical illumination on its past and present. This article reviews the common and highly broadcasted opinion that claims that recent Brazilian fantastic fiction – usually called Magic Realism – had its starting point and began to be discussed after 1947, when Murilo Rubião published O ex-mágico, his collection of short stories. Current analysis rejects such an idea and admits a prior visibility (and in process) of such Brazilian theoretical and fictional practice. In fact, critics point to two known sources of the “modern” fantastic stance (Kafka and Hispanic-American fiction). A theoretical discussion on its Brazilian counterpart shall also be discussed. It may thus be possible to discuss Magic Realism in the Brazilian literary past as a local literary phenomenon within theoretical and fictional terms.