Word.ws English Dictionary

hysterical realism

hysterical realism noun: a literary genre typified by a strong contrast between elaborately absurd prose, plotting, or characterization, on the one hand, and careful, detailed investigations of real, specific social phenomena on the other.

Noun

hysterical realism (uncountable)

  1. A literary genre typified by a strong contrast between elaborately absurd prose, plotting, or characterization, on the one hand, and careful, detailed investigations of real, specific social phenomena on the other.
    • This is not magical realism. It is hysterical realism. […] The conventions of realism are not being abolished but, on the contrary, exhausted, and overworked.2000 July 24, James Wood, “Human, All Too Inhuman”, in The New Republic, →ISSN

Origin of hysterical realism

Coined by English critic James Wood in 2000 to describe Zadie Smith's White Teeth.

Questions about hysterical realism

What does hysterical realism mean?
Hysterical realism means a literary genre typified by a strong contrast between elaborately absurd prose, plotting, or characterization, on the one hand, and careful, detailed investigations of real, specific social phenomena on the other.
What part of speech is hysterical realism?
Hysterical realism is a noun.

Words near hysterical realism in the dictionary

  1. hysterical
  2. hysterical blindness
  3. hysterical blindnesses
  4. hysterical historical
  5. hysterical historicals
  6. hysterical realism
  7. hysterically
  8. hystericalness
  9. hystericization
  10. hystericizations
  11. hystericize

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hysterical realism (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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