The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination

Bibliographic Data

ID20022513
AuthorsHaiyan Lee (0000-0001-6324-8896, corresponding author)
Year2014
Pages376
Publication date2014-11-12
Open AccessYes
TypeBOOK
VenueThe Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherStanford University Press (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.11126/stanford/9780804785914.001.0001
OpenAlexW4298075286
Open LibraryOL29065057M
ISBN9780804785914
LanguageEN
Citations received38

This book investigates the modern Chinese moral imagination through the figure of the stranger. Strangers are outsiders who come into our communities and stay with us, bringing alien manners and values with them and never quite renouncing their mobility. They are a threat to a community’s peace and order, but they also promise change and renewal. In modern China, the stranger has been a ubiquitous figure that tests the moral limits of a society known for the primacy of consanguinity and familiarity. This book employs the concepts of kinship sociality and stranger sociality to map out the moral dilemmas and responses set in motion by the coming of strangers. It surveys the Chinese moral landscape by following the itineraries of several groups of strangers—foreigners, peasant migrants in cities, bourgeois intellectuals in exile, disenfranchised class enemies, uncloistered women, animals on the edge of human society, and apparitions in a secular age—across a range of narrative and visual genres from the late imperial period to the new millennium. It makes a twofold argument: that the pervasive sense of moral crisis in contemporary China has roots in both the Confucian and socialist pasts, and that imaginative literature is the best training ground for coping with the quintessential condition of modernity in which strangers are routinely thrown together.

Aesthetics · Art · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Chinese history and philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology · Arts and society · china · Chinese literature · Chinese literature, history and criticism · History and criticism · Literature and society · Moral conditions · Social conditions · Strangers in literature

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