Reading for the Moral: Exemplarity and the Confucian Moral Imagination in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Short Fiction

Contents
List of Figures
List of Abbreviations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Reading for the Moral
	The Provenance of the Stories
	Prefaces and Commentaries: Staging the Ideal Readership
	The Debate on the Five Cardinal Relationships
	Exemplarity, Nature, and Nurture
	Virtue and/as/vs. Retribution
	Book Overview
Chapter 1 Filial Quests
	Traditional Discourse of Filial Piety in the Ming
	Representations of Filial Piety in Vernacular Stories
	The Story of Wang Yuan
	The Making of a Filial Son
	The Fleeing Father
	The Abandoned Mother
Chapter 2 Filial Dilemmas
	Stark Choices
	Filial Murderers
	Filiality and the (Female) Body
Chapter 3 The Spectrum of Loyalty
	Tales of Martyrs and Survivors
	Loyal Subjects Amid the Ruins
Chapter 4 Female Exemplarity and the Violence of Virtue
	Tang Guimei, or the Drama of Filiality and Chastity
	The Suicide Widow and Her Mother
	The Faithful Widows of the Xiao Family
Chapter 5 Interchangeable Brothers
	Exemplary Brothers
	Estranged Brothers
Chapter 6 Friends in Need and Friends in Deed
	The Late Ming Discourse of Friendship
	Wang Mian and the Domestication of Exemplary Friendship
	Exemplary Friendship and Male Chastity
Concluding Note
Appendix
Notes
Bibliography
Index