Reader Acceptance and Estrangement in Morrison's Beloved and Clarke's Piranesi

Magical realism and weird fiction are two genres that have become increasingly discussed in contemporary literary studies. However, previous research has largely focused on defining the characteristics of these genres, rather than on the specific readerly effects produced by their shared use of supernatural or impossible elements. I argue that it is not the presence of such elements alone that determines reader response, but the narrative strategies through which they are presented. To analyse this, I apply Iser’s reader-reception theory to Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi (2020) with particular attention to narrative gaps and indeterminacies. Although these novels belong to different genres, they share similar themes of memory, sentient architecture and identity, which make them suitable for comparative analysis. Iser's textual structures help identify and analyse several similar narrative strategies in both works that evoke differing reader receptions. I conclude that reader experience is shaped by genre frameworks, which produce acceptance in magical realism and estrangement in weird fiction.