Ethical Literary Criticism as a Cultural Poetics

Ethical Literary Criticism has been gaining rapid development in China's academic world since the beginning of this century. It proposes the reading, analysis and interpretation of literary works and literary phenomena from the ethical perspective, and stresses the edifying function of literature, which accords with the turn of Western literary criticism since the 1970s. This paper argues that ethical literary criticism bears the feature of cultural poetics. It points out that all the literary classics of the Axial Age emphasiz their function of moral teaching. The paper justifies the validity and legitimacy of ethical literary criticism through analyses of the ethical identities of the characters, the changes in their ethical relationships and the consequences of their ethical choices in "The Book of Ruth" of the Hebrew Bible.