The term 'magical realism' was coined in 1925 by the German art critic Franz Roh for a style of painting, decades before its literary use, yet the movement is most closely associated with Latin American fiction of the mid-twentieth century, especially the Latin American Boom. Scholars disagree on whether the literary movement is a genuine continuation of Roh's art-critical category or an independently arisen Latin American mode that happened to inherit the same name.
What would resolve this A documented chain showing, or ruling out, direct influence from Roh's art criticism on the early Latin American writers who first used the mode would settle the question; existing scholarship has not established one conclusively either way.
OpenComparative literature and the history of the term's transmission from art criticism to literary criticismEncyclopaedia Britannica