Narrative Form and Gender Politics: On Feminist Narratology

Feminist narratology has enjoyed a history of development of about twenty years in the West, but it has not received due attention from Chinese literary theorists and critics. As an interdisciplinary approach, feminist narratology combines the investigation of narrative form with gender politics, thus destabilizing the formalism/antiformalism opposition that has constituted a staple of Western literary criticism for a very long time. As the first theoretical discussion of feminist narratology in China, the present paper will first offer a survey of its history of development, and then try to delineate and clarify its nature and characteristics from two specific angles: 1) the difference between feminist narratology and feminist literary theory and criticism; 2) the relation between feminist narratology and structuralist narratology.