Includes index.

Preliminary Material -- 1 Sociality in Early Modern China: An Ontological Appraisal -- 2 Historicizing Social Development and Self-Realization -- 3 Fountainheads of Change: Yan Fu’s Tussle with Evolution -- 4 Empathetic Vision in Yu Dafu’s Fiction -- 5 An Exile of Self-Disinheritance: Revisiting Qu Qiubai -- 6 Non-Epiphany in Ye Shaojun’s Lyrical Vision -- 7 How Steel Is Tempered: The Making of a Revolutionary Hero -- 8 Retributive Memories: Self-Realization in the Post-Mao Era -- 9 Zhang Chengzhi’s Reinvention of Ethnic Identity -- Glossary -- Works Cited -- Index.

In Signposts of Self-Realization , Xinmin Liu offers an ontological study of education and development of the individual self through the prisms of ethical progress and social evolution in the context of modern Chinese literature and film. Did self-realization in the Chinese modern follow the law of Social Darwinism: the biggest ego always won out? Is individualism always self-regarding, never other-regarding? How did the Greater I evolve out of the Lesser I socially and ethically? Confronting these questions, the author navigates through the terrains of paraphrastic translation, Buddhist nonself, lyrical epiphany, redemptive memory and ethnic orality to map out an alternative path for the growth of a modern Chinese self.