A General Narratology

This book attempts to provide a basic theory for all narratives, in order to shake narratology off its age-long novel-centrism. There are storytellings everywhere in human culture, from primitive to modern times. The scholarship of narratology has been developed for centuries, and this includes the “emancipatory” Post-Classical Narratology of recent decades.This book gives a classification of all narratives including performative narratives (such as theater, visual broadcasting, ceremony, competition), semi-performative narratives (such as cinema), and mental narratives (such as dream and hallucination), among which conative narratives, such as advertisement, promise and divination, are a unique kind. This book provides and discusses the criteria that can make distinctions clear and unconfusing. Each kind of narrative is given a detailed discussion on its factual and fictional variations.

Yiheng Zhao is a Professor of Semiotics and Narratology at the College of Literature & Journalism, Sichuan University, Chengdu, China; currently, Director of The Institute of Semiotics & Media Studies (ISMS); Chairman of the Academic Committee of The Association of Chinese Communication and Semiotic Studies (ACCS); and Member of the Collegium of The International Association of Semiotic Studies (IASS).

Since the late 1970s, he wrote two dozen of books and around 250 essays on those topics. His major works in English include The Uneasy Narrator (1994), Toward a Modern Zen Theatre (2001), The Muse from Cathay (1983), and The River Fans Out (2000). He wrote and published extensively in Chinese, including Semiotics of Literature (1984), Comparative Narratology (1994), The Lure of the Other Bank (2003), Semiotics: Principles and Problems (2011), A General Narratology (2013), and Philosophical Semiotics (2017) in Chinese. Part of his works were republished in his 8-volume Selected Works (2013).