From material to romantic egoism: A comparative history of Chinese and European novels, 1550--1850

This dissertation is a comparative study of the rise of the novel in early modern China and Europe. It argues that in both cases this literary development was rooted in the ideological impact of rapid commercial developments, which, in motivating individuals to pursue economic self-interests, disintegrated traditional moral structures emphasizing political hierarchy, social duty, and kinship ties. As a result, virtue came to be redefined as a private and internal property unrelated to an individual's external position and public identity. By focusing on the novelistic protagonist's metamorphosis from the "material egoist" to the "sentimentalist" to the "romantic egoist," my dissertation tries to illustrate that the developments of the novel in China and Europe were likewise shaped by a process of public-private division in the larger cultural consciousness. This thesis is offered in hopes of shedding new light on familiar Chinese texts within the field of Chinese studies, while broadening the general intellectual discourse on the "novel" by developing a cross-cultural perspective into this genre that has been almost exclusively defined in European terms.