Magical Realism in Neil Gaiman’s Coraline

Abstract

Magical realism, as a narrative mode or genre in adults’ literature, has been in vogue since its revivifying with the publication of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). However, the depiction of the genre in children’s and juvenile literature is a new trend; the presence of its elements have been traced and proved feasibly applicable in the interpretation of recent children’s fiction such as David Almond’s Skelling (1998). In this regard, the main concern of the present article is to sift the characteristic features of magical realism within Neil Gaiman’s Coraline (2002) through the application of Wendy B. Faris’s theoretical framework of the genre therewith Tzvetan Todorov’s definition of the fantastic in order to introduce the novel as an exemplar of magical realism in the domain of children’s literature.

Keywords

• coraline
• magical realism
• wendy b. faris
• tzvetan todorov
• marvellous
• matter-of-fact narration
• the other mother