Coterminous Worlds: Magical Realism and Contemporary Post-Colonial Literature in English.

Coterminous Worlds: Magical Realism and Contemporary Post-Colonial Literature in English, ed. Elsa Linguanti et al. Cross/Cultures 39. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999. ISBN 9042004487.

The editors of Coterminous Worlds have put together a valuable collection of essays that consider magical realism in light of post-colonial studies. The introduction notes that magical realism offers ways for writers to engage with Otherness within the text itself. A number of the contributors point out the dry nihilism of postmodernism and, by contrast, the inventiveness of magical realism, in its efforts to find ways to depict simultaneous (and often contradictory) cultural traditions and world-views. The title of the volume, actually a quotation from the prose work of Robert Bringhurst, aptly describes this project of depicting not mimetic reality but the complex felt experience of human beings. Authors whose works form the "canon" of magical realist literature--from Carpentier to Garcia Marquez--are discussed, though the volume is devoted mostly to commentaries on the works of other, newer authors, many from outside the literary traditions of the West. Readers of this journal will note that the works of a number of African writers are featured in the essays: Ivan Vladislavic, Ben Okri, Zakes Mda, Kojo Laing, Mia Couto, and Syl Cheney-Coker.

The essays in Coterminous Worlds cover a wide range of literature (mostly fiction, though a little poetry), which includes works of authors such as Janet Frame, Wilson Harris, Jack Hodgins, Robert Kroetsch, Gwendolyn MacEwen, David Malouf, Michael Ondaatje, Joe Rosenblatt, Salman Rushdie (represented in several of the essays), and Patrick White--in addition to the works of authors mentioned above. With its discussions of new and marginalized writers, Coterminous Worlds makes a ...