A storyworld is the abstract structure that a reader, viewer, or player reconstructs from the textual, visual, or interactive evidence provided by a narrative. The term is most closely associated with narratologists such as Gérard Genette and Marie-Laure Ryan, who use it to describe the totality of a narrative’s implied reality—not merely what is explicitly stated, but the consistent domain from which those statements derive their coherence.
Ryan, in Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory (1991), develops the storyworld as a constellation of possible worlds centered on an actual world of the narrative, with satellite worlds representing characters’ beliefs, desires, obligations, and counterfactual projections. This modal structure makes the storyworld a natural object for formal treatment.
In the Reproducible Paracosm framework, the storyworld corresponds to the paracosmic sketch and its model category : the sketch encodes the fabula (the underlying story logic), and each model represents a particular sjužet (a specific discourse realization). The modal endofunctors formalize what narratology describes informally—viewpoint, epistemic framing, and the space of narrative possibility.
The storyworld is distinguished from a secondary world by scope: secondary worlds are self-contained fictional realities (typically associated with fantasy and science fiction), while a storyworld is any narrative’s implied reality, including realist fiction. Every secondary world is a storyworld, but not every storyworld is a secondary world.