Exploring Magic Realism in Salman Rushdie's Fiction

Kluwick breaks new ground in this book, moving away from Rushdie studies that focus on his status as postcolonial or postmodern, and instead considering the significance of magic realism in his fiction. Rushdie’s magic realism, in fact, lies at the heart of his engagement with the post/colonial. In a departure from conventional descriptions of magic realism—based primarily on the Latin-American tradition—Kluwick here proposes an alternative definition, allowing for a more accurate description of the form. She argues that it is disharmony, rather than harmony, that is decisive: that the incompatibility of the realist and the supernatural needs to be recognized as a driving force in Rushdie’s fiction. In its rigorous analysis of this Rushdian magic realism, this book considers the entire corpus—Midnight’s Children, Shame, The Satanic Verses, The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Shalimar the Clown, and The Enchantress of Florence. This study is the first of its kind to do so.

Melodrama and Narrative Fiction: Towards a Typology

Recent research on melodrama has stressed its versatility and ubiquity by approaching it as a mode of expression rather than a theatrical genre. A variety of contexts in which melodrama is at work have been explored, but only little scholarly attention has been paid to the relationship between melodrama and novels, short stories and novellas. This article proposes a typology of melodrama in narrative prose fiction, examining four different categories: Melodrama and Sentimentalism, Depiction of Melodramatic Performances in Narrative Prose Fiction, Theatrical Antics and Aesthetics in Narrative Prose Fiction and Meta-Melodrama. Its aim is to clarify the ways in which melodrama, ever since its early days on the stages of late eighteenth-century Europe, has interacted with fictional prose narratives, thereby shaping the literary imagination in the Anglophone world.