Prospectus

I return, having laid waste to much of what has kept me occupied.

As I have spent much of my time writing some critical essays, I shall post them as they become available.

Here is the prospectus for a piece on Magical Realism and Romance in Moon Knight.

Part of the interest in Magical Realism is the difficulty in its definition.  If we take Wendy Faris’ definition of the term, then the genre expands to include many more texts, some of which had been previously categorized in a different manner.  Many of these newly re-shelved texts sit elsewhere under the traditional heading, “Romance.”  Because of the ambiguity regarding these two headings and the intersection of their genres, I shall refer to each as a “category” to avoid confusion.

In this paper, I shall discuss the intersection Romance and Magical Realism.  Methods of analysis shall include comparisons of each category’s contrast against Realism and exploration and clarification of the definitions of these categories, referring primarily to Northrop Frye and Wendy Faris.

The primary text I shall analyze in this light will be the graphic novel series Moon Knight, paying special attention to the story arcs “The Bottom” and “God and Country.”  Here I will use my observations on Magical Realism and Romance to analyze the plot and the characters of this text.  I hope to be able to place this work squarely into one of those categories, but I expect to find that Magical Realism merely sits in the middle of a Lanserian spectrum running from Romance to Realism.