The Cross-Cultural Consciousness of Contemporary Narrative Poetics

Abstract Narrative poetics in the past two decades have demonstrated growingly strong cross-cultural consciousness, which has been fueled in no small part by cultural globalization and transnational academic exchanges, to the degree that some narratologists even call for the so-called “transnational turn” and “comparativist turn” in narratology. As rejoinders to such trend, two recent volumes, Narratology and Ideology: Negotiating Context, Form, and Theory in Postcolonial Narratives1 and Unnatural Narrative across Borders: Transnational and Comparative Perspectives2 continue to make contributions to this fertile and promising field. Both volumes apply existing and emerging narrative theories to a number of intercultural fictional narratives, seeking to explore the narrative dynamics in various literary texts from non-Western nations. While different in terms of the specific countries, regions, or cultural communities from which they select their narrative texts, these two books are interrelated not only in the sense that they both place emphasis on contextualism and articulate the interrelationships between formalist poetics and ideological thematics, but also in the sense that they both shift their attention from Western-centered narratives to non-Western marginal narratives so as to question the narratological universalism derived from Western canon and subvert the hegemony of mainstream narrative inquires.