The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms

symbol of the power of the colonized and
oppressed to act as a revolutionary force
and to resist and dismantle the static,
fixed and conservative force of European
aesthetic and politic force.
Despite these politicized readings of
the form of magical realism, following
the so-called ‘Boom’ period of magical
realism in the 1960s and the overactive
promotion by publishers and distributors
of novels which employed the form, some
post-colonial critics attacked it as having
become a means of reinforcing stereotypes
of the post-colonial world as an
exoticized Other.
At the same time, and perhaps under
the increasing tendency of post-colonial
texts to ‘write back to the centre’, in
Salman Rushdie’s phrase, European and
American writers began to explore the
ways in which reality could be opened up
and shown to be a gloss on the more complex
forces at work in the so-called ‘rational’
societies of the post-Enlightenment
period in their own backyards. Genres,
such as the Gothic and Science Fiction
had already posed just such a critique of
post-enlightenment rationality, as had
psychological fiction from a different
perspective, but now the concept of ‘magical
realism’ asserted that the interaction
of realism and the supra-rational was the
mode which might best allow us to
explore the complexities and contradictions
of all late twentieth-century
societies. See also REALISM.
See J. S. Alexis, ‘Of the magical realism
of the Haitians’ in Présence Africaine
(1956); Maria-Elena Angulo, Magic
Realism, Social Context and Discourse
(1995); Jean-Pierre Durix, Mimesis,
Genres and Post-Colonial Discourse:
Deconstructing Magic Realism (1998);
Franz Roh, Nach-Expressionismus.
Magischer Realismus. Probleme der
neuesten Europäischen Malerei (1925);
Mannerism 135
Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy
B. Faris (eds), Magical Realism: Theory,
History, Community (1995).
GG
Mannerism Has three different, but
related usages: as a fairly narrow stylistic
term; as a historical period; as a broad
literary mode.
A mannered style is marked by obtrusive
‘mannerisms’ or peculiarities: often
an elaborate syntax and elevated diction,
remote from a colloquial register. Since
the manner remains the same irrespective
of the matter, the twin dangers of monotony
and bathos threaten. Mannered
writers, such as Sir Thomas Browne or
Walter Pater, are better taken in small
doses. But a mannered style, in drawing
attention to presentation as distinct from
representation, may bring aesthetic gains.
By analogy with the mannerist painting
of the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth
centuries, mannerism may, as a term for
a ‘period’, designate the transition
between Renaissance and Baroque literature.
The widespread mannered styles of
the period, such as Euphuism and
Gongorism, might be called mannerist,
rather than just mannered.
As a literary mode rather than a
period, mannerism largely overlaps with
BAROQUE. Indeed E. R. Curtis substituted
mannerism for baroque altogether, but
extended its reference to mean the dialectical
antithesis of classicism, in whatever
period. He defined mode in terms of
style. Mannerist style is hermetic and
ingenious, full of paradox and puns,
asyndeton, hyperbole and pleonasm. For
other critics mannerism means, more
dubiously, a style reflecting a psychological
type or sociological pressures.
The mannerist spirit is calculating, yet,
passionate, disharmonious and modern.
In English literature the METAPHYSICAL