Reading for the Moral : Exemplarity and the Confucian Moral Imagination in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Short Fiction

Reassesses didacticism in seventeenth-century Chinese vernacular fiction and challenges the view that the late Ming was a notoriously immoral time. Contents 6 List of Figures 8 List of Abbreviations 10 Acknowledgments 12 Introduction: Reading for the Moral 14 The Provenance of the Stories 17 Prefaces and Commentaries: Staging the Ideal Readership 20 The Debate on the Five Cardinal Relationships 30 Exemplarity, Nature, and Nurture 34 Virtue and/as/vs. Retribution 35 Book Overview 37 Chapter 1 Filial Quests 40 Traditional Discourse of Filial Piety in the Ming 41 Representations of Filial Piety in Vernacular Stories 44 The Story of Wang Yuan 46 The Making of a Filial Son 49 The Fleeing Father 53 The Abandoned Mother 57 Chapter 2 Filial Dilemmas 62 Stark Choices 63 Filial Murderers 70 Filiality and the (Female) Body 82 Chapter 3 The Spectrum of Loyalty 96 Tales of Martyrs and Survivors 97 Loyal Subjects Amid the Ruins 112 Chapter 4 Female Exemplarity and the Violence of Virtue 118 Tang Guimei, or the Drama of Filiality and Chastity 121 The Suicide Widow and Her Mother 131 The Faithful Widows of the Xiao Family 136 Chapter 5 Interchangeable Brothers 140 Exemplary Brothers 142 Estranged Brothers 146 Chapter 6 Friends in Need and Friends in Deed 152 The Late Ming Discourse of Friendship 154 Wang Mian and the Domestication of Exemplary Friendship 160 Exemplary Friendship and Male Chastity 167 Concluding Note 172 Appendix 178 Notes 182 Bibliography 220 Index 236 Reading for the Moral offers an innovative reassessment of the nature of moral representation and exemplarity in Chinese vernacular fiction. Maria Franca Sibau focuses on two little-studied story collections published at the end of the Ming dynasty, Exemplary Words for the World (Xingshi yan, 1932) and Bell in the Still Night (Qingye zhong, c. 1645). Far from being tediously moralistic tales, these stories of loyal ministers, filial children, chaste widows, and selfless friends provide a deeper understanding of the five cardinal relationships central to Confucian ethics. They explore the inherent tension between what we might call textbook morality, on the one hand, and untidy everyday life, on the other. The stories often take a critical view of mechanical notions of retribution, countering it with the logic of virtue as its own reward. Conflict between passion and duty is typically resolved in favor of duty redefined with a palpable sense of urgency. In constructing vernacular representations of moral exemplars from the recent historical past rather than from remote or fictitious antiquity, the story compilers show how these virtues are not abstract or monolithic norms, but play out within the contingencies of time and space--back cover Reading for the Moral offers an innovative reassessment of the nature of moral representation and exemplarity in Chinese vernacular fiction. Maria Franca Sibau focuses on two little-studied story collections published at the end of the Ming dynasty, Exemplary Words for the World (Xingshi yan, 1632) and Bell in the Still Night (Qingye zhong, c. 1645). Far from being tediously moralistic tales, these stories of loyal ministers, filial children, chaste widows, and selfless friends provide a deeper understanding of the five cardinal relationships central to Confucian ethics. They explore the inherent tension between what we might call textbook morality, on the one hand, and untidy everyday life, on the other. The stories often take a critical view of mechanical notions of retribution, countering it with the logic of virtue as its own reward. Conflict between passion and duty is typically resolved in favor of duty, a duty redefined with a palpable sense of urgency. In constructing vernacular representations of moral exemplars from the recent historical past rather than from remote or fictitious antiquity, the story compilers show how these virtues are not abstract or monolithic norms, but play out within the contingencies of time and space.