ABSTRACT
The first decade of the twenty-first century witnessed an upsurge and a flourishing of time travel fiction in China, a process that is physically, logically, and/or humanly impossible. The boom of this new narrative genre has been fueled in no small part by the “postmodernist turn” coupled with the “historiographical turn”, to the degree that it is no longer possible to read it along the lines of traditional narrative theory. With contemporary Chinese time travel fiction as its central concern, this chapter pursues four major goals: (1) to uncover the genre’s dominant unnatural patterns and means of time travel, (2) to reveal its unnaturalness from such perspectives as metalepsis, prolepsis, self-contradictory narration, and multiperson narration, (3) to examine its consequences and values of being unnatural, and (4) to offer a way of naturalizing it by suggesting the intersection of unnatural narratology with ethical narratology.
