"Alice Munro's stories can unsettle readers by entangling them in the lives of ordinary people without overt moral comment. Through her own brand of realism, Munro creates characters whose empirical morality is based on personal choices and on empathy or its absence rather than on traditional criteria of right and wrong. Li-Ping Geng goes to the heart of the matter as he traces the sources of Munro's moral stance to empirical Enlightenment philosophers like David Hume and Adam Smith. His insights will deeply satisfy Munro fans."
Jane Rupert (PhD), author of Uneasy Relations: Reason in Literature & Science from Aristotle to Darwin & Blake and John Henry Newman on the Nature of the Mind: Reason in Literature, Science, and the Humanities.
1. Tradition and Innovation 2. Revisioned Feminism in Lives of Girls and Women 3. Sympathy and Empirical Morals 4. Discursive Structuring and Revamped Mimesis 5. Conclusion
Li-Ping Geng is a Professor of English at the Beijing Foreign Studies University, China. His primary interests are in 18th-century British literature as well as Canadian literature.