Elements of Grotesque Realism in the Novels One Hundred Years of Solitude and Midnight’s Children
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18485/beoiber.2022.6.1.5Abstract
The ideas proposed in Mikhail Bakhtin’s study Rabelais and His World are considered to be hugely influential in contemporary literary criticism. Since the notion of the carnivalesque culture of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance opens numerous possibilities of exploring multiple perspectives, eliminating the boundaries between the official and unofficial cultural tendencies, it is broadly applicable to the discourse of magical realism, which is also marked by the ability to encapsulate the richness of the worlds it depicts. The aim of this research is to provide insight into the function of the carnival-grotesque form in two monumental magical realist narratives, Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981). Despite cultural differences, the two novels are undoubtedly connected, especially in terms of their incorporation of grotesque and humorous elements, which not only emphasize the sheer abundance of the two worlds, but are also used as a response to the endless tragedies which can be seen as the consequences of their political systems.References
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