茂腔是莫言家乡的地方小戏，与小说《檀香刑》中的猫腔构成原型关系，并对《檀香刑》的创作产生了多方面影响。首先，童年记忆中的茂腔是《檀香刑》创作的灵感来源，莫言观看茂腔《铡美案》的经历对小说中的酷刑情节有启发意义。其次，《赵美蓉观灯》等茂腔唱段中的大段“炫技”影响了莫言小说的文学叙事，在《檀香刑》中体现为旁枝逸出的叙事特点。再次，《檀香刑》仿照《罗衫记》等茂腔剧本，融入了丰富的猫腔戏文，并使用大量方言土语，形成了协律可歌、通俗质朴的语言风格。在接受茂腔影响的基础上，《檀香刑》也作出了创造性转化：突破茂腔行当划分不清的缺陷，借鉴京剧的人物图谱；克服茂腔剧本文学性差的缺点，使用更加简约流畅的语言；抽离茂腔中的封建残骸，以历史故事讲述现代思想。借助茂腔这一民间小戏，《檀香刑》实现了向中国传统民间文学的“大踏步撤退”。

Maoqiang Opera, a local opera in Mo Yan’s hometown, is the prototype of Cat Opera in Mo Yan’s works, and has multiple influences on the creation of Sandalwood Death, one of Mo Yan’s representative works. First of all, Sandalwood Death is inspired by Mo Yan’s childhood memory of Maoqiang Opera. His experience of watching Maoqiang Opera The story of Chen Shimei inspired the plots of cruel torture in his novel. Secondly, excessive virtuosity in Maoqiang Opera like Zhao Meirong’s Lamp has influenced Mo Yan’s literary narration, characterized by subplots in Sandalwood Death. Thirdly, based on Maoqiang Opera like Luoshanji, Sandalwood Death integrated his works with abundant lines of Cat Opera, and used lots of dialects, forming rhythmical, popular and plain language style. On the basis of Maoqiang Opera, Sandalwood Death achieved creative transformation as it made a breakthrough by borrowing roles from Peking Opera in order to replace the ambiguous types of roles of Maoqiang Opera; it also overcame the shortcoming of the lack of literariness, and used simpler and more fluent language; additionally, it abandoned the feudal thoughts and traditions in Maoqiang Opera, and spread modern ideas through history stories. By means of Maoqiang Opera, Sandalwood Death achieved “great retreat” towards Chinese traditional folk literature.