Volume 8, No. 1

The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is a masterpiece by Australian author Richard Flanagan, following his Booker Prize win in 2014. The author uses magical realism to intertwine two ethical threads – the extinction of natural life and the desolation of human intrinsic life value -symbolized by the “disappearance” of the protagonist’s body parts. The novel reflects on this dual crisis. Ultimately, Flanagan points out that the root cause of this dual crisis is the rupture of the community of life between humans and nature. Based on this, Flanagan calls for a re-examination of human subjectivity in his work, and the reshaping of a sense of community between humans and nature centered on symbiosis and coexistence, in order to save both the natural world and humanity itself.

Education is a principal theme in Jane Eyre. Born into the family of a curate in a rural parish, Charlotte Brontë started her study at home and then was educated in several schools. Taking the issue of education as a central perspective, this paper investigates the situation of the circulation of literary discourses in the processes of writing, publishing, reading, criticism and reproduction of this novel. It tries to analyze the situation of rural governance in nineteenth-century England and its impact on Jane Eyre and the following literary discourses, aiming to shed new light on the universal mode of literary production in this age.

With the publication of Marx’s Capital as the central sign, the 1860s belonged to what Hobsbawm called “the age of capital” where transportation, capital, and trade constituted “imperial circuits” that shaped the texture of the Victorian daily life. Within this decade, Dickens completed his last masterpieces Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend, and the unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Influenced by the ideology of globalization and free-trade imperialism, Dickens melted exotic and oceanic elements into his imperial narratives. Many characters of his were involved in the “imperial enterprise.” Railways and steamships replaced stage coaches; joint-stock companies and stock market speculation replaced local merchants and small businesses; social capital circulation and overseas markets became new engines of class mobility. By examining Dickens’s later works, this article reviews the spatial and discursive practices of 19th century global geopolitics, free-trade landscape, and the circulation of capital and commodity, which constitute an interdependent, infiltrated, but uneven and unequal economy, reveals the colonialist roots of British overseas trade and reflects on the paradoxical spirit of the Victorian age.

In the process of adapting The Story of Lute, Gao Ming discovers three ethical choices for Cai Bojie based on his different ethical identities. He did not want to take the imperial examination, but was forced to do so by his father; he did not want to become an official, but was forced to do so by the emperor; he did not want to remarry, but was forced to do so by the offical. All these ethical dilemmas are caused by the contradictions arising from Cai Bojie ethical identity. When he finds an identity for himself, all ethical dilemmas are resolved. Gao Ming creates this complex ethical dilemma and concludes it with a happy ending, which is essentially an expose and reflection on the survival of the scholar who is an official. He hopes to provide a kind of psychological comfort to the readers who work as officials in the government through the teaching function of The Story of Lute, and at the same time, he also looks forward to providing good education to the people, which reflects Gao Ming’s ideal of wanting to save the country through his writing.

As one of the most influential British writers in contemporary times, McEwan has won the recognition of both academia and market with his superb narrative skills and continuous concern for morality and ethics of the current society. Based on this feature of McEwan, Professor Shang Biwu puts forward the important assertion of “Narrative Art and Ethical Ideology” in his new book A Study of Ian McEwan’s novels and their Ethical Values. Through a systematic study of McEwan’s novels, Professor Shang invokes the Ethical Literary Criticism to discuss the issue of events in the novels and the storytelling behind them, incorporating many narratological elements such as narrator, narrated, narrative focus, implied authorship, unreliable narrative, unnatural narrative and so on into his writing, taking the ethical loss of young characters, the ethical confusion of middle-aged characters and the ethical redemption of old characters as the starting points to conduct in-depth analysis, so as to present the complete narrative purpose and ethical landscape of McEwan’s creations.