Introduction to Ethical Literary Criticism

Nie Zhenzhao, MAE, is currently Professor and Yunshan Chair on World Literature and Languages at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, China. Previously he was a Distinguished Professor of Literature and founding director of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies of World Literature at Zhejiang University, where he transferred to emeritus status in 2022. He is an elected foreign member of the Academia Europaea.

• 1. Introduction Part 1: Ethical Literary Criticism: Basic Theory 2. What is Ethical Literary Criticism 3. The Sphinx Factor and Ethical Selection 4. The Origin of Literature: Issues and Misreading 5. Ethical Literary Criticism: A Moral Tradition 6. Ethical Literary Criticism and Moral Criticism 7. Re-Reading Classical Literature 8. Western Ethical Criticism 9. Ethical Literary Criticism in China Part 2: Ethical Literary Criticism: Case Studies 10. Ethical Taboo and the Tragedy of Oedipus 11. Ethical Concerns in Thomas Hardy's Works 12. The Law of the Jungle in The Old Man and the Sea 13. Incest and Revenge in Mourning Becomes Electra 14. The Transformation of Ethics in China's May Fourth Poetry

‘The noblest mission of IAELC, as formulated in Nie Zhenzhao's teachings, is to restore the critical discipline to its proper suppleness and subtlety, its engagement with central human purposes, undoctrinaire, faithful to its documents, respectful of historical knowledge, and in short empirical in the best and most sensitive readerly way.'Claude Rawson, Yale University, USA'It seems to me that Ethical Literary Criticism is valuable in that it seeks not just to revise moral criticism, but to modernize and "update" it for our own time. I thus think that Ethical Literary Criticism may have potentially useful things to say not just about the literature of Samuel Johnson's or Arnold's or Leavis's age, but also about earlier (and later) works.'Galin Tihanov, Queen Mary University of London, UK'Nie Zhenzhao's Introduction to Ethical Literary Criticism illuminates the working logistics and principles of ethical literary criticism, generating a variety of ethical events and ethical conflicts in literary works, providing a new approach to literary studies after the "ethical turn" in western deconstructive and postmodern literary theory and criticism, creating new contemporary Chinese trends in literary criticism and theory, and anticipating the future anterior of the Asian literary critical discourse.'Youngmin Kim, Dongguk University, South Korea