What are you reading right now?

jadis · 07-14-2022, 10:24 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by adidasss

Magical realism? I recognize Rowling from the description but doesn't she just write fantasy (and the occasional thriller)?

Dunno, haven't read enough of the HP novels to have an opinion on their genre. I got this parallel from Eagleton (who defines the genre probably somewhat loosely, which I'm fine with). This is the entirety of the paragraph I quoted above:

Quote:

Yet these patrician landscapes, as with the whimsical fables of P. G. Wodehouse or the Gothic scenarios of Mervyn Peake, are too socially marginal to be much more than splendid curios. Much the same can be said of the fantasy worlds of the Oxford conservative medievalists (Tolkien, C. S.Lewis), natural aristocrats who, unable to see modern democratic life as much more than a dismal decline, took refuge in their own self-enclosed mythological worlds. The notion of a ‘spiritual’, traditional or authentic England underlying the degradations of the modern is inherited in different style by Peter Ackroyd. This mixture of myth, magic, freakishness and social realism has recently staged a momentous come-back with J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels. Alternatively, you could find a self-contained world by looking to place rather than nation, as in the organic communities of Laurie Lee and John Cowper Powys, Peter Ackroyd’s fascination with London, Melvyn Bragg’s Cumbria, Graham Swift’s Waterland or Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh. Where surreal fantasy and social satire intersect most fruitfully is in the women’s novel, not the Woosterish one. This combination, which can be found in women writers as different as Muriel Spark, Fay Weldon and Jeanette Winterson, is at its most potent in the Gothic or carnivalesque imaginings of Angela Carter, one of the finest of all postwar English fiction writers.