Volume 7, No. 3

Museum was a public space to display order, cultivate citizens, and con- struct cultural identity, which exerted a major influence on modern life, and then be- came an object of literary writing. William Morris affirmed the museum’s education role, and viewed museums as a field to realize his socialist ideals. However, under the capitalist system, museums are subject to political power and follow the logic of capital. The direction the museums taking is contrary to Morris’s political ideal. In News from Nowhere, Morris attacks the manipulative purpose of museum visits, and attempts to construct a museum as an equal, interactive and sharing space to high- light art and social ethics. From the perspective of Ethical Literary Criticism, the political and capital intervention of collection and exhibition serves as the ethical knot of the museum narrative, while the visitors’ identity anxiety as its ethical line, and they interweave with each other to constitute the museums’ existential crisis.

Wizard of the Crow is of great significance in Ngugi’s fictional works. On the one hand, Ngugi portrays many characters belonging to different camps, who make different choices in the process of revolution, implying Ngugi’s thoughts on the ethics of revolution. On the other hand, Ngugi proposes a different perspective of African revolution in the post-Cold War neoliberal trend. Ngugi reminds of the necessity and possibility of resistance. “The Third World” is presented as alternative cosmopolitan intellectual resources to redress the recolonization of Africa under the exertion of Western financial hegemony. Therefore, this unprecedented mode of interaction between cosmopolitanism and nationalism is the unique feature of Ngugi’s strategy of resistance.

Chunhyangjeon is a classic in Korean literature, which tells of a story circulated among the public for centuries. The circulation processes of the story Chunxiang have witnessed various variations, hundreds of different versions and text groups taking shape. A novel of nearly the same, Chunxiang, published in 2014 by Jin Renshun, the Chinese female writer, whose ethnic belonging is Korean, is an expansion and adaptation of Chunhyangjeon. The female writer reinterprets the classic text through the lens of a new concept of modernity, which ultimately creates an intertextuality with the previous texts and falls behind the previous texts in form and content. It would not only reveal the basic law of literary spread and acceptance but also benefit the in-depth cognition of Chinese and Korean literature and culture if we examined the variation of specific stories in the past century from the perspective of comparative literature variation theory.

Brushstrokes is a British Chinese bilingual literary magazine started up in the mid-1990s. Launching from 1995 to 2004, it has published 28 issues with nearly 1,000 pages and more than 900,000 words in content. Brushstrokes has a wide range of themes, genres and authorship. This article deliberates on more than 150 Chinese and English poems published in Brushstrokes, inquiring their major themes, literary value and historical significance. It finds that these poems shared themes of diaspora adversity, racial discrimination, and Chinese identification, and the poets are mainly grassroots Chinese diasporas; the poets’ identity background, writing language and diaspora situation endow their poetry with a unique style to represent history, and such realistic-poetic writings are closely interlinked with the historical situations of China and Britain as well as the relation between the two countries in history. These poems provide us with precious historical materials to understand the real living conditions of the British Chinese. Due to the scant output of research on the British Chinese in the field of either Overseas Chinese Literature or Overseas Chinese Studies, Brushstrokes poetry deserves extensive attention and full research with its unique and important significance in both literature and history.

Qi Jun’s novels, The Chignon and The Orange Turns Red, illustrate the ethical order and concepts of traditional family life and the moral anxiety and ethical dilemmas that arise within static and enclosed family environments. The narrator, “I” deeply cherishes the bygone family home with its imprints of the era. However, with a modern rational consciousness, the narrator also perceives the contradictions and crises within. The voice of questioning and reflection becomes more prominent, and the ethical conflicts at the narrative level become increasingly apparent. Qi Jun’s background further complicates the ethical choices depicted in her works. Firstly, the author’s ethical choices, under her awareness, align perfectly with the moral norms of traditional families. Secondly, her sense of identity generates moral pressure, leading to sharp contradictions between individual ethical choices and societal ethical standards. Thirdly, the roles of “daughter” and “niece” that the narrator corresponds to imply deeper ethical dilemmas under the sense of identity. Moral anxiety and the yearning to break free from it become the emotional foundation and creative driving force of Qi Jun’s family stories.