A Black Cultural Study In Terms Of Oral Tradition, Myth And Magical Realism In Beloved

Toni Morrison, who is the only African-American woman writer winning the Nobel Prize for literature, made great contributions to the contemporary literature, especially, black literature. Her works mainly focus on the issues of race and gender, from the perspective of American black women, describing how they suffered from gender and racial oppression and expressing how they pursued the future life. Her works always explores the history, fate and spirit of African-American people to provide the important historical materials for people learning their suffering. Toni Morrison has been called a writer of magic realism to compose "modern myth" because she was immersed in the folk tales and folk traditions of black people in her childhood.Beloved is the most important work of Toni Morrison, which was awarded Pulitzer Prize in1988. It has become the top of classic masterpiece of magic realism. The reason why Beloved achieves such extraordinary success and attracts so many readers all over the world lies in Morrison’s unique artistic style of blending magic realism, which is rooted in Latin American literature and absorbs the essence of the Western modern literary schools, with the traditional black culture rooted in her native soil.The present thesis begins with the identity of the author, the African-American black, exploring her family background, and analyzing the writing techniques of magic realism from the perspective of the African-American traditions to prove the fact that her writing style, magic realism, results from her traditional education of African-American family. It is divided into five chapters. Chapter one offers a brief introduction about Toni Morrison and critical review on Beloved. Chapter two illustrates the characteristics of the traditional black culture and three artistic principles of magic realism, to find out their correlation. Chapter three discusses the writing techniques affected by traditional black culture. Chapter four analyzes the presentation of magic realism in Beloved. Chapter five draws a conclusion that Morrison’s writing style of magic realism comes from the effect of her traditional African-American family. The thesis intends to penetrate into the root cause of the expression of magic realism through Morrison’s identity of African-American black, to reflect the strong desire to encourage African-American people to wake up and face their history.