The term was coined first by German art critic Franz Roh in 1925, and Alejo Carpentier first described its current usage in the prologue to his book, "El reino de este mundo." According to Raymond L. Williams (writing for Twayne's World Authors Series Online), "For Carpentier, this special reality finds its roots in the marvelous nature of the American cultural experience and history. He proposes there are similarities between this marvelous American reality and poetic epiphany."
But as the poet Dana Gioia reminds us in his article, "Gabriel García Márquez and Magic Realism," the narrative strategy we know as magic realism long predates the term: "One already sees the key elements of Magic Realism in Gulliver's Travels (1726)...Likewise Nikolai Gogol's short story, "The Nose" (1842), in which a minor Czarist bureaucrat's nose takes off to pursue its own career in St. Petersburg, fulfills virtually every requirement of this purportedly contemporary style. One finds similar precedents in Dickens, Balzac, Dostoyevsky, Maupassant, Kafka, Bulgakov, Calvino, Cheever, Singer, and others."
