Nights at the Circus | Literary Precedents

Nights at the Circus Literary Precedents

Magic Realist fiction includes such disparate texts as One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Beloved by Toni Morrison, Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel, and Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie. While some of these books were published subsequent to Nights at the Circus and thus cannot be taken as precedents, they nonetheless serve to situate this particular novel within a literary tradition. Of special interest is Garcia Marquez's 1972 short story entitled "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings," which also has a main character equipped with feathered appendages, and similarly explores reactions to this unsettling intrusion of the unreal into the real.

William Butler Yeats' famous lyric poem "Leda and the Swan" recounts how Zeus in the guise of a swan rapes Leda. From their union is hatched Helen of Troy, who is in turn to become a pawn in male war games....
(read more)