The Comparison Between Life And Death Are Wearing Me Out And Beloved From Historical Perspective

From a historical perspective, this thesis aims to compare and analyse Toni Morrison’s representative work Beloved and Mo Yan’s Life And Death Are Wearing Me Out. Both of them are famous writers in the contemporary era, who successively won the Nobel Prize. Considerable researches about the two writers and their works have been done. Published in 1987, Beloved reflects the issues of American slavery and the reconstruction of the South from 1855 to 1873. It provides a platform for the African Americans, even all Americans to recall the historical memory of that period.In Life And Death Are Wearing Me Out, Mo Yan uses intensive languages and rich senses, digging into the historical development from 1950 to 2000 and showing the peasant’s love and hate and their ups and downs in rural life. In this paper, the author makes a comparison between the two works from the research method of parallel study in Comparative Literature. Based on historical perspective and other theories such as narratology and magic realism, this thesis attempts to show the inextricable relationships among history, culture and people, through the comparison and analysis of specific texts and historical contexts of the two novels.Besides the introduction and conclusion, this thesis is divided into four parts. The introduction mainly includes a brief introduction to Toni Morrison and Mo Yan and their two works, the literature review on Beloved and Life And Death Are Wearing Me Out, the general introduction to the main theory new historicism and the significance of the study.Chapter One “ Resurrection of History: the intertextuality between texts and history ” discusses the relationship between the written history and the history described in these two novels. Through the comparison and analysis of details in the two novels and the intertextuality of the two versions of history, this part aims to reflect the two writers’ different attitudes towards history. The first section overviews the specific time and events reflected in the two novels. The second section is the issue of the relationship between the written history and the history described in these two novels, such as their differences and similarities. The last section concludes thewriters’ different opinions about history and remind people to profoundly rethink history.Chapter Two “Writing of History:the Products of Authority” uses Focault’s discourse theory to discuss the relationship between discourse and power and reveal the difference between history and the written history. History is always controlled by the power discourse and encroached by the dominant consciousness.Chapter Three “Criticisms of History: Deconstruction of History by magic realism ” deconstructs the truth of history by the analysis of the details in the novels and some assisted theories such as Magic realism.Chapter Four ”Reconstruction of History: Fictions Are More Close to Realities”focuses on the reconstruction of history in the two novels from a narrative perspective and linguistic features.The last part serves as a conclusion, through the comparison between Beloved and Life And Death Are Wearing Me Out via the perspective of historical, to make readers appreciate more the interrelationship between the society, history and culture in the novel and the relationship between the two writers’ subjectivity and the social and historical environment. By facing history and its changes, the author of this thesis appeals readers to reflect upon history and think of the future.