Abstract

Magic realism as a literary genre originated from Latin-American in the 1950s, which is known to the world because of its unique glamour of art and aesthetic value. After Gabriel García Márquez got the Nobel Prize of Literature, more and more critics pay attention to his works as well as magic realism. Since then, magic realism has become popular and widely accepted. As a result, many writers were influenced by magic realism in their writing including Toni Morrison (Nobel Prize winner of Literature in 1993) and Mo Yan (A Chinese writer who won the Nobel Prize of Literature in 2012).

Critics have done many thorough researches on Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Mo Yan’s Big Breasts & Wide Hips from the perspective of feminism and symbolism. There are also researches on magic realism in these two novels compared with Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. The writer noticed that both Toni Morrison and Mo Yan are not really admitted their identity as magic realists. Therefore, this thesis concentrates more on the comparative study of Beloved and Big Breasts & Wide Hips (FRFT as an abbreviation in this thesis), providing more thoughts and ideas in this field.

This thesis employs magic realism as theoretical foundation and mainly focuses on the style of magic realism in Beloved and FRFT. It adopts text analysis and comparative study as research methods. It first discusses the expression of magic elements and reality in the two novels. Then, it does a vivid analysis from the following three perspectives: magic narrative techniques, magic-realistic symbols, and the employment of mythological archetypes and sacred scripture. Finally, the differences between Beloved and FRFT can be found, which also reveals that both novels are different from the magic realism in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Based on this, hallucinatory realism can be a very significant and hot topic for critics to further their study on magic realism. This thesis is not only a necessary supplement to the study on magic realism, but also provides important reference frame in the study of magic realism’s transmission in China.

Key words: magic realism, Beloved, Big Breasts & Wide Hips, Mo Yan