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as developed into “one of the most exciting new paradigms” (Alber, Iversen, Nielsen & Richardson 2010:113) and become “an emergent strand of work in narrative theory” (Herman 2013:ix). It is the “systematic study of unnatural narratives” (Alber & Richardson 2020:6), many of which have been consistently neglected or marginalized in the existing narratological paradigm.

While existing narratological frameworks suffer from a mimetic bias and consequently ignore the many unnatural or impossible features of the literary world not to mention the question of how readers can make sense of them, Unnatural Narratology highlights the fact that narratives are also full of unnatural features and recognize these unnatural narratives as one of “the driving forces” of literary history (Alber 2011:64). 

The most critical feature of fictional narratives is that they not only reproduce the empirical world around us but also often contain unnatural elements that would be impossible in the real world. Ronen (1994) argues that fiction might feature impossible objects that diverge from their real-world counterparts. Currie (2007) goes one step further, arguing that the impossible object, and even the impossible world is the fundamental possibility of fiction. Many fictional narratives do, in fact, confront us with unnatural features that transcend the parameters of the real world. Especially in postmodernism, many works radically deconstruct traditional narrative elements such as time, space, character, and narrator and move beyond the real-world parameters, leading readers to the farthest reaches of conceptual possibilities. As a result, this new trend naturally calls for a new approach to dealing with these unnatural narratives and interpreting them. 

2.2 Definitions of Unnatural Narrative

There are two kinds of definitions of the term unnatural narrative. While Richardson (2015) regards unnatural narrative as anti-mimetic text, Alber (2013a) defines it as impossible scenarios and events that violate the physical law of the real world and principles of logic or transcend human limitations.

For Richardson, the “unnatural” correlates with antimimetic features and the effect of defamiliarization. Richardson (2015:3) defines unnatural narratives as narratives that contain “significant antimimetic events, characters, settings, or frames”. By antimimetic, he refers to “representations that contravene the presuppositions of nonfictional narratives, violate mimetic conventions and the practices of realism, and defy the conventions of existing, established genres” (Richardson 2015:3). It is worth noticing that by antimimetic, he means “anti-mimetic in the sense of Plato” rather than “in the sense of Aristotle” because even though the unnatural narrative does not manage to imitate or reproduce the world and even transcends real-world parameters, it does represent the human world and human experiences (Alber, Iversen, Nielsen & Richardson 2012:378). 

Richardson further distinguishes between “the mimetic”, “the non-mimetic”, and “the anti-mimetic”. From his perspective, Anna Karenina is mimetic because it attempts to reproduce in fiction typical characters and events from the real world; a fairy tale is non-mimetic because it is a conventionalized genre; and the anti-mimetic not only breaks mimetic conventions but also defies established genre conventions (Richardso本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。