Magic realism in literature is perceived as a movement, tendency or type of modern fiction of Latin American origin. Scholarly reflection of this complex phenomenon, variously represented in individual national literatures, agrees that it merges two ways of seeing and depicting, two systems of representation: Enlightenment-rational („realist“) and supernatural-mythical („magic“).
This thematic issue of the journal WLS proposes to map possible affiliations with magic realism in Central European literatures. We are interested in scholarly recognition of the appropriation of significant works of world literature and in analyses of inspirations that rediscovered the „magical“ in narrative traditions of own literature, or induced the formation of idiosyncratic authorial, national or „area“ models of magic-realist narration.