Chapter 25 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho examines the reception of Sappho’s poetry in early modern Germany, Italy, and Spain, examining figures such as Benjamin Neukirch, José Antonio Conde, Maria Fortuna, Louisa Karsch, Alessandro Verri, Vincenzo Maria Imperiali, Benito JerÓnimo FeijÓo, María Rosa GÁlvez de Cabrera, Ugo Foscolo, Giacomo Leopardi, Madame de Staël, Franz Grillparzer, Carolina Coronado, Gertrudis GÓmez de Avellaneda, Giovanni Pascoli, Magnus Hirschfeld, Pierre Louÿs, Rainer Maria Rilke, Natalie Barney, Renée Vivien, Colette, Federico García Lorca, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Nada Peretti, Salvatore Quasimodo, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Cesare Pavese, Christine Brückner, and Carme Riera.

In contemporary parlance, magical realism is most often considered to be a phenomenon of Latin American origin that as of the 1960s spread to the rest of the world, and primarily to postcolonial or emerging literatures. It should be remembered, though, that between the two World Wars in Europe there arose something we might call magic realism, to distinguish it from later magical realism. The roots of this European movement are to found in German and Italian literature, with a later development in Flemish literature. Names to mention are Ernst Jünger, Massimo Bontempelli and Hubert Lampo. Later authors to have been linked to the mode, though now usually retrospectively with reference to the magical variant, are Günther Grass, Milan Kundera, Angela Carter, José Saramago and Carlos Ruiz Zafón.