The Meeting of Narrative Ethics and Chinese Classical Novels

In the post－classical narratology and the context of rhetoric revival, there is a remarkable characteristic that the study of narrative has turned to ethics. In terms of the current study in China, the academia has paid more attention to the narrative ethics in contemporary novels and ignored that in classical novels. The classical novels’ concern for the ethics qualifies them as novels containing the most typical Chinese characteristics. Studying the narrative ethics in these novels not only provides a strategy for interpreting classical novels, but also shows our ethical attitude towards narratives in classical novels.