Order out of Chaos in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin

The present article aims at demonstrating, through the privileged prism of chaos theory, how a number of similarities can be found in two different, although in many ways akin, literary works: Beloved by Toni Morrison and Mornings in Jenin by Susan Abulhawa. Chaos theory has come to take a transdisciplinary dimension and, as such, it has encompassed many fields. Its different key concepts were adapted to domains such as physics, economics, psychology, literature, etc. The present study provides brief definitions of important related key concepts e.g. the butterfly effect, order and chaos, fractal iterations, bifurcation, and strange attractors. The point is to explain how chaos theory has been adapted to literary criticism. And with some concrete examples taken from the two novels, our aim is to highlight the outstanding similarities between them. The logical outcome of our argument is to show how order emerges, dialectically speaking, out of chaos in both literary works.