It was Stephen Dedalus, a character in Joyce's Ulysses (1922), who once famously stated that ‘history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake’, and some of the edge of Dedalus's idea animates the essays brought together in this section. One of the most contentious areas surrounding the analysis of magical realism is the intrinsic depth attached to the use of fantasy in magical-realist novels. Is fantasy, for example, simply a case of escapism or does it voice a concrete political critique? Does the fantasy in a magical-realist novel indicate the hallucinations of an artist who is in the process of retreating from the world around him, or does it embody the desire for a more just political world? This is the Janus-like dilemma which the essays in this section attempt to address. David Henn, in his essay ‘History and the Fantastic in José Saramago's Fiction’, for example, focuses on three of the Nobel prize-winner's novels, Raised from the Earth (1980), Baltasar and Blimunda, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1984), and The Stone Raft (1986), which helped to secure the Portuguese writer's international reputation. Whether describing the construction in 1717 of a ‘flying machine’, or the empiric survival of a poet's nom de plume (Ricardo Reis) after the poet's actual death (Fernando Pessoa), or the uncoupling of the Iberian Peninsula from France and its subsequent floating across the Atlantic towards America, Saramago is able to root his descriptions within the realm of the historical and the everyday – a hallmark, as Henn underlines, of the playful trappings of magical realism. In ‘Magical-realist Elements in José Eustasio Rivera's The Vortex’, Humberto Núñez demonstrates that Rivera's masterpiece contains a number of characteristics which locate it squarely as a forerunner of the evolution of magical realism in Latin America. These include the use of myth and legend, the reference to magic and the supernatural, allusions to ethnic and cultural heterogeneity, the presence of the jungle's flora and fauna, and the denunciation of social injustice and criminality. For her part, Alejandra Rengifo, in ‘Beyond Magical Realism in The Red of His Shadow by Mayra Montero’, shows how Montero underpins her depiction of a harsh, everyday reality in Haiti with a brooding sense of the supernatural.