Realismul magic și „anxietatea influenței”
Magical Realism and the “Anxiety of Influence”

Summary/Abstract: A brief survey of magical realist novels and the related criticism published from the 1960s to the present confirms the long-lasting career of the collocation. Beyond the abusive labeling, one can still frame a hard core of magical realist fiction published in the Latin-American cultural milieu, a local movement that became a global one later, in the 1980s, only to receive further distinctive features in the Western cultural centers, in the postcolonial world, or in Central-European literatures of former communist countries. The aim of this paper is to map the theoretical field and to trace the invariants and the influences implied by different definitions: could we talk about the pervasive import of a successful formula, or are these novels related through some common issues, despite the cultural and political differences of the emerging milieu? Is this mode the “brand” of a literary period, or a transversal mannerism crossing spatial and chronological borders? What is the proportion between mannerism and the “anxiety of influence”? We try to emphasize not only the “best-seller” characteristics, but also the features which place these novels in the academic canon or in the epicenter of the postcolonial debate, and we look at what is peculiar to magical realism besides these mappings. Finally, we redefine magical realism as a narrative mode born from the conflict between the individual and the social/political/cultural imaginary of the time.

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