Abstract
What is narrative? A narrative is a narrator’s account of a sequence of events, presented in a certain language, following a certain narrative structure. “Modes,” according to John G. Cawelti, “are ways in which specific cultural themes and stereotypes become embodied in more universal story archetypes” (Cawelti in Adventure, mystery, and romance. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, p. 6, 1976). To put it briefly, modes are patterns of conventions that are specific to a particular culture or context. And a literary mode is a combination or synthesis of a number of specific cultural conventions with a more universal story form or archetype. With the above definition of “mode” as a starting point, we can define “narrative mode of fiction” as “the functional framework through which the fictionists recount stories in a given language in the course of their narrative production.” So far a lot of research on fiction narratology has already been done by scholars in China and in the West. In this chapter we will apply some of their findings to the narrative production process of Chinese and Western popular fiction in an effort to explore the similarities and differences of narrative modes between Chinese and Western popular fiction from the angles of narrative time and narrative perspectives.
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Notes
- 1.
Yu Shi Ming Yan is a collection of short stories written by Feng Menglong in the Ming Dynasty. Its initial title was Gu Jin Xiaoshuo (Stories Old and New), but later this title was changed into Yu Shi Ming Yan (Stories to Enlighten the World). So the title of this collection of short stories has different translations, which include “Stories to Enlighten the World,” and “Stories Old and New.”—Translator’s note.
- 2.
It is generally acknowledged that up to the Song Dynasty (960–1279 AD), there were seventeen “authentic” historical books or records compliled by historians, including Historical Records (Shi Ji) by Sima Qian (145–?? BC), Book of Han (Han Shu) by Ban Gu (32–92 AD), History of the Three Kingdoms (Sanguo Zhi) by Chen Shou (233–297 AD), History of the Northern Dynasties (Bei Shi) by Li Dashi (570–628 AD) and Li Yanshou (??–??), etc.—Translator’s note.
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Huang, Y. (2018). Narrative Modes of Popular Fiction. In: Narrative of Chinese and Western Popular Fiction. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-57575-8_4
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