Abstract: As a founder and major proponent of unnatural narratology, Brian Richardson is one of the most prominent narratologists in contemporary Western academia. Defining unnatural narrative as "one that contains significant antimimetic events, characters, settings, or frames", Richardson analyzes its unnaturalness from such aspects as story, discourse and narrative representation apart from revealing its ideological function. The controversies of unnatural narratology, to a large extent, center on the concept of the unnatural, and methodology and applicability of the theory. To fully develop "a poetics of unnatural narrative," unnatural narratologists, Richardson in particular, need to further clarify the concepts of unnatural narratology at a micro-level on the one hand, and to develop an interpretive model which will be fruitfully improved and revised through practice at a macro-level on the other.

Key words: Brian Richardson, unnatural narratology, anti-mimesis