Magical places

The term magical reality suggests a new lens through which literary geographies may be viewed (Lovell and Griffin, forthcoming; Lovell, forthcoming). Magical reality embodies the imagination (including wonder, the extraordinary, marvellous, fantastical and fairytalesque) in the world. The term was first used to describe post-colonial Latin American literature, juxtaposing the technological magic of the “new” world and the spirituality of the “old.” These dualities are intertwined in Russia’s literary tradition of the maravilloso, or the marvellous-real place, which is the paradigm used in this discussion.

In the context of tourist encounters with surreal art installations in outdoor places, Lovell and Bull, (2017, p.8) suggested that tourists both attribute magically real qualities to places and also experience places in magically real states including the ‘dreamlike, poetic, otherworldly, rescaled, phantasmagorical and uncanny.’ With so many potential new technologies involved in the ways in which we see places, from cinematic locations to projection mapped light installations, how is the marvellous real moving from page to place?