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Uncertain Mirrors realigns magical realism within a changing critical landscape, from Aristotelian mimesis to Adornoâ€™s concept of negative dialectics. In between, the volume traverses a vast theoretical arena, from postmodernism and postcolonialism to LÃ©vinasian philosophy and eco-criticism. The volume opens and closes with dialectical instability, as it recasts the mutability of the term â€œmimesisâ€ as both a â€œworld-reflectingâ€ and a â€œworld-creatingâ€ mechanism. Magical realism, the authors contend, offers another stance of the possible; it also situates the reader at a hybrid aesthetic matrix inextricably linked to postcolonial theory, postmodernism, Bakhtinian theory, and quantum physics. As Uncertain Mirrors explores, magical realist texts partake of modernist exhaustion as much as of postmodernist replenishment, yet they stem from a different â€œlocation of cultureâ€ and â€œdirection of culture;â€ they offer complex aesthetic artifacts that, in their recreation of alternative geographic and semiotic spaces, dislocate hegemonic texts and ideologies. Their unrealistic excess effects a breach in the totalized unity represented by 19th century realism, and plays the dissonant chord of the particular and the non-identical.