Toward a Comparative Narratology: A Chinese Perspective

Abstract

Abstract As a rejoinder to Susan Stanford Friedman's call for a transnational turn in narrative theory, this article attempts to draw attention to a comparativist turn in current narrative studies, addressing three broad questions: why compare, what to compare, and how to compare. A comparative narratology is expected to decolonize and to subvert the hegemony of European and Anglo-American narrative theory, and thus both paves the way for the rise of those marginalized narrative theories and draws attention to those neglected and peripheral narratives. Apart from presenting a Chinese counterpart of Western narrative theory, it tries to specifically engage with newly developed unnatural narrative theory by analyzing Chinese ghost stories, a particular type of unnatural narrative in Chinese literature, so as to display its unnatural features as well as its challenges to existing Western unnatural approaches.