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for her to her two sisters and even ends their father-daughter relationship. However, the King of France admires her more for her quality, they marry and Cordelia becomes the queen of France. Goneril and Regan gradually expose their cruelty and ruthlessness to Lear. Cordelia fails to rescue her father and both of them died in the end. In the meantime, the subplot of Gloucester’s family is also experiencing the subversion and disorders: abnormal father-son relationship and discording between brothers. The bastard Edmund, who never comes to terms with his lowly social position, designs an misunderstanding between his father and his legal brother Edgar. 

Chapter 2 Theoretical Foundation

2.1 A Brief Overview of Ethical Literary Criticism

Considering the severe situation of the absence of ethics and serious confusion of views of value in domestic literary criticism, Professor Nie Zhenzhao led other scholars, using western ethical criticism for reference and basing on Chinese moral criticism, and produced the methodology of ethical literary criticism. Western ethical criticism has an early start which can be traced back to the ancient Greek times. At that time, it had already been regarded as a critical perspective to appreciate the moral values embodied in literary works. Until to 1960s, ethical criticism was considered again in America and its rising was mainly attributed to Wayne Clayson Booth, Martha C. Nussbaum and James Phelan. For the purpose of revitalizing ethical criticism, Booth had published a series of works, in which he studied and discussed some important problems related to it. For instance, he put forward that the basic task of ethical criticism was concentrating on the inner ideological thoughts of texts and the influences on readers in his essay “Freedom of Interpretation: Bakhtin and the Challenge of feminist Criticism” (1982, 45-76). From that, not only the significance of ethical studies in works was emphasized but also the reflections of readers from ethics in literary works which may have a great impact on constructing ethical and moral views in society were concerned. That was why he firmly defended for the rationality of literary ethical criticism through the manner of practicing his relevant theories in concrete analysis of classical novels. Later, Richard A. Posner, on behalf of the dissenting voice in American academic circle, elucidated his arguments opposed to ethical criticism in detail in his essay “Against Ethical Criticism” and he held on the belief that the proper criteria for evaluating literature are aesthetic rather that ethical (1997: 2), putting aesthetic values in the commanding height of literary criticism. 

2.2 Three Perspectives of Ethical Literary Criticism

Since Professor Nie took the lead in founding and developing ethical literary criticism on the basis of western ethical criticism and Chinese moral criticism in 2004, there has been a rising number of concrete practices of text analysis under its instruction appearing at home, which is beneficial to develop this critical methodology. In an interview record, Nie had said that without the quality of interdisciplinary, there would be no emergence of ethical literary criticism and then no development of it. The reason why ethical literary criticism can be recognized in the academic circle is that it is the product of interdiscipl本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。