SOURCE: “Magic Realism and Fantastic History: Carlos Fuentes's Terra Nostra and Giambattista Vico's The New Science,” in Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 8, No. 2, Summer, 1988, pp. 249-56.

In the following essay, Zamora examines Carlos Fuentes's use of magical realism to interpret historical fact in Terra Nostra.

As Seymour Menton has recently reminded us in his study, Magic Realism Rediscovered, the term “magic realism” dates from the twenties in Germany, where it was used by the art critic Franz Roh to describe the relationship of painting to the reality it represented, and to suggest the desirability of a return to a more realistic mode than the expressionism predominant at the time.¹ Recently, however, the term would seem to have been more or less permanently borrowed from the visual arts by critics of literary art, in particular, critics of contemporary Latin American fiction, who have—perhaps too unequivocally—shifted the original...