TY - BOOK AU - Nasrin Babakhani PY - 2022 CY - Berlin, Germany PB - Peter Lang Verlag SN - 2366-5068 SN - 9783631880876 TI - Cultural Realism: Reconsidering Magical Realism in the Works of Contemporary American Women Writers DO - 10.3726/b19792 UR - https://www.peterlang.com/document/1251759 N2 - This book is committed to women as writers and storytellers; all the selected novels are female-centric in that the main characters are women. The authors, also women, are from three diverse American ethnic groups from both the North and South. Through a close reading of several novels, Babakhani shows how the reinvention of cultural traditions serves these women writers as a political, decolonial, and feminist tool. Babakhani situates her readings in a critique of the concepts of realism and magical realism.  Because magical realism sets realism against magic and implies binary oppositions, Babakhani proposes "cultural realism" as a revisionary concept that takes the cultural importance of rituals and beliefs seriously, without simply dismissing them as superstition. LA - English ER -