Abstract：Henrik Skov Nielsen’s unnatural narrative theory not just remains at the level of pure formalist description. It also pays attention to the ways of interpreting unnatural narratives. While defining unnatural narrative, Nielsen considers both unnatural narrative’s formalist aesthetics and readers’ interpretation of it at the same time, emphasizing its feature of expanding the boundary of narrative forms. He then proposes “unnaturalizing reading”, advocating that readers should jump out of the existing cognitive frames based on experiential lives and refuse to naturalize fictional texts to the representation of real lives so as to gain fresh critical insights. Nielsen’s unnatural narratology establishes in the broader context that narrative forms undergoes constant expansion. His narrative poetics based unnatural narratives in return can interpret those narrative practices with new rhetorical forms and offer a kind of formalist perspective for understanding the development of literary history.
Key words: Henrik Skov Nielsen; unnatural narrative; unnaturalizing reading
