ABSTRACT
GEN~RALLY SP.EAKING, NARRATIVE poetry was less develo~ed in an~ient Chma than m many other parts of the world.! There IS no Chmese Illiad or Odyssey and no Mahabharata or Ramayana. With its emphasis on "speaking of the intentions" or "following feelings" (yuanqing t.# +~,) traditional literary criticism was biased in favor of lyrical poetry, the lack of a doctrine of mimesis discouraging the objective qualities necessary for the full development of narrative verse.2 In contrast, early European poetry was narrative, and the later Western critical tradition was based on the narrative theory developed by the ancient Greeks and Romans to discuss their epics and dramas.3 Although many theories of lyrical verse flourished in later ages in the West, narrative theory is an important branch of modern Western criticism, too, but at the present time it centers more on the study of the modern Western novel.
