| Description |
1 online resource (ix, 306 pages). |
| Physical Medium |
monochrome |
| Description |
text file |
| Series |
Harvard East Asian monographs ; 274
|
|
Harvard East Asian monographs ; 274.
|
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 267-292) and index. |
| Contents |
Moral agency and narrative storytelling -- Predicaments of modernity in late-Qing novels : 1895-1911 -- The prison of self-consciousness in May fourth fiction -- Social fiction : must context entail determinism? -- Moral decision in Mao-era fiction -- Historical trauma and humanism in post-Mao realism -- Defiance and fatalism in roots-seeking and avant-garde fiction -- Self-ownership and capitalist values in 1990s Chinese fiction. |
| Access |
Use copy Restrictions unspecified MiAaHDL |
| Reproduction |
Electronic reproduction. [Place of publication not identified] : HathiTrust Digital Library, 2010. MiAaHDL |
| System Details |
Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. http://purl.oclc.org/DLF/benchrepro0212 MiAaHDL |
| Processing Action |
digitized 2010 HathiTrust Digital Library committed to preserve MiAaHDL |
| Summary |
By examining how narrative strategies reinforce or contest deterministic paradigms, this work describes modern Chinese fiction's unique contribution to ethical and literary debates over the possibility for meaningful moral action. How does Chinese fiction express the desire for freedom as well as fears of attendant responsibilities and abuses? How does it depict struggles for and against freedom? How do the texts allow for or deny the possibility of freedom and agency? By analyzing discourses of agency and fatalism and the ethical import of narrative structures, the author explores how representations of determinism and moral responsibility changed over the twentieth century. She links these changes to representations of time and to enduring commitments to human-heartedness and social justice. Although Chinese fiction may contain some of the most disconsolate pages in the twentieth century's long literature of disenchantment, it also bespeaks, Knight argues, a passion for freedom and moral responsibility. Responding to ongoing conflicts between the claims of modernity and the resources of past traditions, these stories and novels are often dominated by challenges to human agency. Yet read with sensitivity to traditional Chinese conceptions of moral experience, their testimony to both the promises of freedom and the failure of such promises opens new perspectives on moral agency. |
| Local Note |
eBooks on EBSCOhost EBSCO eBook Subscription Academic Collection - North America |
| Subject |
Chinese fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism.
|
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Chinese fiction. |
| Chronological Term |
20th century |
| Subject |
Ethics in literature.
|
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Ethics in literature. |
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HISTORY -- Modern -- 20th Century. |
| Chronological Term |
1900-1999 |
| Genre/Form |
Electronic books.
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Criticism, interpretation, etc.
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| Added Title |
Moral agency in twentieth-century Chinese fiction |
| Other Form: |
Print version: Knight, Sabina, 1966- Heart of time. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Asia Center : Distributed by Harvard University Press, 2006 (DLC) 2006015383 (OCoLC)68624141 |
| ISBN |
9781684174423 (electronic book) |
|
1684174422 (electronic book) |
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067402267X (hardback ; alkaline paper) |
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9780674022676 (hardback ; alkaline paper) |
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