ABSTRACT
Chinese Nobel laureate Mo Yan transforms magical realism by drawing on classical Chinese literature and traditional culture in his debut novel, Red Sorghum, and the highly metafictional The Republic of Wine. Although Mo Yan was influenced by canonical magical realist writer Gabriel Garciá Márquez early in his writing career, he consciously strives to develop his own, “purer” Chinese style and distances himself from magical realism as a taxonomical description of his work. Mo Yan’s fiction, therefore, demonstrates the limitations of using magical realism as a rubric for literary analysis and the importance of recognising underlying cultural and artistic elements. The chapter challenges the conventional notion of a linear development of magical realism as a narrative mode, instead suggesting a history of polygenesis, or the emergence of magical realism in different places and at different times.
