| This thesis focuses on novels from two postcolonial authors: Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. It explores how, by engaging the reader in a political and ontological dialogue, the interplay of postcolonialism, magic realism, and metafiction creates an awareness in the reader of the contestations that exist between various traditional categories---colonialist and postcolonialist, migrant and native, reader and text, truth and fiction---without introducing an absurdity that could lead to irrelevance. In constructing this argument, there is discussion on the controversies surrounding the legitimacy and usage of the terms postcolonialism, metafiction, and magic realism as literary descriptions and epistemological frameworks. Key correlative concepts developed are the discursive nature of texts, the significance of hybridity and blasphemy in creating identity, the limitations of essentialism, and the capability of literature to act as a political lens. |
