World Poetics, Narrative Poetics, and Genre Studies

As a response to Wang Ning's proposal for world poetics, this paper makes a brief revisit to Earl Miner's work on comparative poetics in connection with his pursuit of literary systems before dwelling on the tenets and principles of Wang's proposed world poetics. Subscribing to Wang's position that all literary theories from different cultures should be given equal access to the theoretical body of world poetics, it takes genre studies as the point of departure and examines Wang's conceptualization of world drama in addition to narrative theory as particular cases to explore the means of constructing world poetics.