This study aims at delineating the cultural work of magical realism as a dominant narrative
mode in postcolonial British fiction through a detailed analysis of four magical realist
novels: Salman Rushdie's Midnight`s Children (1981) Shashi Tharoor`s The Great Indian Novel
(1989) Ben Okri`s The Famished Road (1991) and Syl Cheney-Coker`s The Last Harmattan of
Alusine Dunbar (1990). The main focus of attention lies on the ways in which the novelists in
question have exploited the potentials of magical realism to represent their hybrid cultural
and national identities. To provide the necessary historical context for the discussion the
author first traces the development of magical realism from its origins in European Painting to
its appropriation into literature by European and Latin American writers and explores the
contested definitions of magical realism and the critical questions surrounding them. He then
proceeds to analyze the relationship between the paradigmatic turn that took place in
postcolonial literatures in the 1980s and the concomitant rise of magical realism as the
literary expression of Third World countries.
