Volume 9, No.3

Situated within the transforming landscape of early twentieth-century rural China, Tie Ning’s Clumsy Flower explores how individuals face ethical dilemmas shaped by war, patriarchy, and social change. This paper applies ethical literary criticism to examine the novel’s portrayal of relationships between the individual and the collective across four dimensions: gender identity, moral choice, generational transition, and community life. The first section considers how the male figures of Xiang Xi, Xiang Gui, and Xiang Wencheng struggle to balance family obligations with national responsibility. The second examines the ethical subjectivity of Tong Ai, Shun Rong, and Shi Yuchan, whose fates are defined by the wife–concubine hierarchy. The third focuses on Qu Deng, Mei Ge, and Xiao Aozi, younger women who experience ethical awakening amid war, desire, and spiritual change. Finally, the paper turns to Benhua village itself, showing how its flexible moral order enables survival while concealing structural injustice. By weaving together personal stories and historical ethics, this study highlights how Clumsy Flower reframes questions of ethical subjectivity and moral complexity in modern Chinese history.

This paper reconstructs Tie Ning’s Korea-related trajectory along an exchange–translation–research axis. On the textual side, Tie Ning’s Diary: Affairs in Seoul (2004) inaugurates a cross-cultural vantage point; on the institutional side, the “Korea–China Writers’ Congress” (October and December 2007) and the “East Asia Literary Forum” (2008, 2010, 2015, 2018) exemplify a shift from bilateral encounters to a multilateral platform. The Korean translation chain (2002-2023) took shape through the synergy of special journal issues, forum anthologies, and publishers. Korean scholarship, evolving from an introductory/synoptic phase to phases of thematic deepening and diversified expansion, has addressed urban and gender questions, family discourse, crime narratives, becoming, ecofeminism, and translation studies. The conclusion identifies lacunae in reception history, translation-oriented analysis, and institutional archives, and calls for comparative reception studies and a documentary history of the Forum. Positioning literature as a medium, translation as a bridge, and the forum as a framework, the study offers an observable paradigm for the transnational circulation of East Asian literature.

Chinese writer Tie Ning is widely recognized for her prolific literary achievements and numerous awards. In 2015, she was awarded the French Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, becoming the first Chinese female writer to receive this honor. Tie Ning has always been dedicated to the exploration of ethical issues and the construction of a national moral framework, and her works profoundly depict the pursuit of human ideals, spiritual conflicts, and existential dilemmas. Her novel The Bathing Women (2000) is set against the narrative background of revolutionary ethics during the Cultural Revolution, portraying women’s ethical dilemmas and subjective choices under historical constraints, while also showcasing their psychological exploration of childhood trauma and self-reflection. Based on the theory of ethical literary criticism, this paper returns to the historical ethical context, focusing on the interplay between the human factor and the animal factor among the “daughters” within the disorder of family ethics. Through a multidimensional examination of historical, moral, and psychological dimensions, it examines the viable paths to moral redemption and contemplates their edifying significance.

The drowning of Quan is the core of the story in The Bathing Women. The author uses a montage narrative to piece together the clues of the incident, exposing the fact that it is a crime intentionally committed by juvenile girls. From a criminological perspective, this paper begins with the dialogues of the unique inner monologues of characters and the complex growing environment, focusing on the significance and far-reaching influence of the nuclear family form on the development of underage individuals, examining Fei and Tiao’s consideration of the right to life of illegitimate children when confronted with the natural conflict between the inherent ethical issues of illegitimacy and the social concept of monogamy, and analysing the reasons for the crimes committed by Fei and Tiao from depictions of their characters, plots and scenes. At a time when the legal and political order of the country as a whole has been hard hit, social mores, values, conflicts and problems become a source of normative acquisition for juvenile, and illegitimate child and the parent would not be understood by society. When Wu cheated on Yixun, Tiao was forced into a parentification dynamic, taking on an overly helpful role within the family, finding the legitimacy excuse in the death of her illegitimate sister, Quan, who fell into a sewage well and died. Growing up as an illegitimate child, Fei lacks the social support of her family, school, and society. She is lured by a married dancer into an unmarried pregnancy and then coerced into a clandestine abortion. Since her friendship with Tiao becomes a rare and supportive social interaction in her life, she designs Quan’s death. The novel reflects social undercurrents and related ethical dilemmas from the comparative discussion of the fate of illegitimate children, probing the good and evil of human nature.

This study employs the theoretical framework of social structural transformation to examine Tie Ning’s literary construction of quotidian existence, revealing how her literary creation responds to three major propositions of China’s modernization process: gender, rural-urban dynamics, and human nature. In terms of gender narrative, Tie Ning transcends conventional gender and urban-rural dichotomies through a distinctive “third-gender perspective,” presenting the life course of the female characters in her works with cold and empathetic strokes. These textual representations illuminate the complex interplay of female body narratives, moral dilemmas, and awakening of subjectivity during periods of social model transition. Regarding the city-country narrative, Tie Ning reconstructs urban-rural relations in modernization through the conceptual lens of “rural subjectivity.” Her works not only reveal the erosion of rural ethics by urban encroachment but also explore the cultural resilience of rural societies in the interstices of modernization. At the level of humanistic exploration, Tie Ning’s works focus on the subtle glory of human nature, and through three-dimensional and complex characterization, she explores the dignity of human beings in the fissure of history and the eternal value of the spiritual home. Her novels serve not merely as faithful chronicles of the era, but a spiritual expedition about “what makes a man a man.” Through the resonance between historical torrents and individual destinies, Tie Ning’s literary creations achieve dual significance: they present both an epic portrayal of social transformation and a philosophical inquiry into the essence of humanity.

This study conducts a corpus-based comparative study of the writing styles of Tie Ning’s novels The Bathing Women and Clumsy Flower at lexical, syntactic, and narrative levels. Corpus findings reveal that although both works adopt a third-person perspective to reflect the characters’ destiny, and struggles amid social changes, they exhibit distinct stylistic features. The Bathing Women, set in an urban context, is featured by psychological portrayal and emotional tension, often incorporating character perspective into the narration of the story. It often uses complex sentences to convey intricate emotions, resulting in a nuanced and rich style. In contrast, Clumsy Flower, rooted in rural life, employs lexicons with regional uniqueness to depict local customs and simple characters. It is subtle in emotional expression, objective and natural in narration, and plain and restrained in language.

This paper maps the research hotspots and evolutionary trends in Tie Ning studies (1980-2024) by conducting a visual bibliometric analysis with CiteSpace and keyword extraction, based on a dataset of relevant journal articles from the CNKI and WoS databases. By analyzing keyword clusters, keyword burstness and keyword timelines, the research identifies feminism as a central theme in Tie Ning studies, complemented by a diverse array of related topics, including novel writing, character development, the exploration of human nature, cultural reflection and narrative techniques. It is anticipated that future research on Tie Ning will expand into interdisciplinary and cross-cultural domains, integrating the Chinese indigenous perspectives and digital humanities to forge new research hotspots. This paper aims to provide a valuable reference for Tie Ning research and offer new perspectives and methodological frameworks to the broader field of literary studies.

Emotion serves as a pivotal element in Tie Ning’s novels, embodying her reflection on human nature and ethics. This study adopts a literary computational criticism approach, utilizing sentiment analysis to examine the sentiment polarity of 15 novels of Tie Ning over a 30-year period from the 1980s to the early 2000s. The aim is to uncover the characteristics and diachronic evolutionary patterns of Tie Ning’s writing of emotions in her novels. Findings reveal that while negative emotions dominate the overarching narrative of Tie Ning’s novels, positive emotions persist and even surpass those in certain texts. Over time, the proportion of positive emotions gradually converges with that of negative emotions, reflecting the intertwined sentiment polarity tension between starkness and warmth in her works. These results substantiate Tie Ning’s commitment to highlighting human’s goodness and grounding her narratives in ideals of truth, kindness, and beauty, while revealing people’s ethical dilemmas and struggles in modern society as well as human evil. Accordingly, this study provides a quantitative foundation for examining the writing of emotions in Tie Ning’s novels, and offers a practical paradigm for the methodological intersections between digital humanities and literary studies.

This study investigates the overseas reception of The Bathing Women through its English-translated version, drawing on online reviews from Amazon and Goodreads as well as critiques from leading academic journals. Using Python to conduct descriptive statistics, sentiment analysis and qualitative content analysis, this study analyzes the effectiveness and obstacles of this work’s dissemination in the English-speaking world. The findings reveal that although the publishers’ brands generate initial visibility and interest, the novel ultimately encounters a cultural discount, with reader engagement and cultural identification falling short of expectations. Furthermore, positive sentiments cluster around the work’s historical setting, character development, and narrative techniques, whereas negative feedback centers on gaps in cultural understanding and perceived deficiencies in translation quality. The study concludes that successful global dissemination of Chinese literature requires a shift from a purely text-centered model toward an audience-oriented communication strategy that leverages social media and reader communities.