Currently, various types of fantasy literature are analyzed primarily as genres within the confines of national literatures. This thesis proposes a cross-cultural approach to fantasy, instead of one in which each "national" genre is analyzed in isolation, and often only with the critical tools and theoretical background of its respective tradition. It argues that there are undeniable parallels between different versions of the short fantasy tale as it has appeared in various traditions, and that studying them together can prove fruitful to our understanding of how fantasy works.

Taking up important collections of fantastic tales by Pu Songling (Liaozhai zhiyi), Barbey d'Aurevilly (Les Diaboliques) and Rod Serling (The Twilight Zone), as well as a number of similar contemporary works, I discuss the ways all of these works function through a similar set of mechanisms, despite their differences in language, provenance, and cultural significance. Each of these authors/creators made liberal use of what I call the "intrusion story," in which what is deemed strange or fantastic in each instance is the overwhelming focus. In the intrusion story, the strange includes the following: dissolved or destabilized boundaries (between categories that are seemingly mutually exclusive such as life and death, human and animal, inanimate objects and living beings, etc.), marginalized figures of society, and narrative subversion of readers' expectations. By using all of these elements, the goal is to maintain the reader or viewer's attention and to deliver the author or creator's moral message.

This inquiry contributes to our overall understanding of fantasy in two ways: First, it creates a framework for examining fantasy across cultures; second: it points to connections between a diverse array of literary creations, instead of abandoning each work to its traditional designation of either zhiguai (strange tale), conte fantastique (fantastic tale), or science fiction. The fox spirit, aristocratic coquette, and android model are from different literary traditions, but their common characteristics and purposes show that there are surprising similarities in the way fantasy stories are manufactured for our consumption and edification.

This dissertation aims to discuss the subject of “inherited responsibly” in Ancient Greece and Early China via a comparative lens. By “inherited responsibility”, I under most circumstances mean the inheritance of the responsibilities down the lineage in a family, or to quote Solon, “the guiltless will pay for the deeds later: either the man’s children, or his descendants thereafter”, which is also echoed continuously in the Taiping Jing (太平经, The Canon of Grand Peace). In light of the immense and complex nature of the materials covered and of the topic itself, I would like to simplify the connotation of the guilt, since guilt, under the context of inherited responsibility, could take various forms, sometimes vague enough for us to know their exact meaning, the kakon in Solon’s poems, or e (恶, evil) in the Taiping Jing, for instance. In this dissertation, guilt will be understood in their own contexts, without having to conform to one set of system to be judged. Matters such as hereditary social status, which is a very common element concerning inherited responsibility in aristocratic societies but is less relevant to our present discussion, will not be excluded, but referred to when necessary. Moreover, collective punishment, the radical expression of inherited responsibility, will also be incorporated into our analysis.

Inherited Responsibility plays a major role in the reflections of both cultures on divinity, society, laws, and human knowledge in nearly all the Greek genres, epic, lyric poetry, tragedy and historiography, and in early Chinese historiography, laws and religions. The prominence of this phenomenon in ancient Greece and early China is highly dependent on the patriarchal nature of their societies, which emphasizes ancestry, blood descent and family continuation. The similar social structure also allows us a solid foundation for the purpose of a comparative study. This dissertation attempts to further our understanding of the role of inherited responsibility that is played in both cultures in general. And through comparison, we are able to observe some striking similarities of its place in establishing theodicy in philosophy and in historiography, aside from many differences due to particulars in cultural contexts, which also belong to our discussions.

This dissertation argues that written form is essential, not accessory, to philosophical content, with particular focus on Plato and Zhuangzi. In the case of these two thinkers, the written forms they have left us are what I call poetic: full of metaphor, imagery, narrative, etc.—characterized in some sense by a lack of systematic analysis. Attending to form thus entails (1) expanding our notion of what counts as philosophically meaningful and (2) radically different interpretations of what Plato and Zhuangzi are up to—i.e., reading their work as poetic texts rather than as containers for preconceived notions in Platonism or Daoism. The dissertation speaks, hopefully, to audiences in comparative literature, philosophy (especially the history of philosophy), classics, and sinology.

This dissertation examines the concept of fate in Greek antiquity from a literary perspective, looking into how and why a literary text uses fate in a certain way. The main texts of this study are the two Homeric epics and Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus. The chief method of this study is literary analysis, which includes close reading of texts, attention to semantic fields, the analysis of story plot, and the comparison of a series of texts over time and across genre. I also pay attention to the problem of formulaic composition and borrow from the methods of folklore studies.

This combination of methods helps to understand Sophocles' innovation in the Oedipus Tyrannus and the figure of Oedipus. The Homeric epics present heroes and their fates in the context of oral composition and transmission. As songs that laud the hero's κλέος in immortal memory, Homeric epics do not problematize free will or portray conflicts between the heroes and their fates. This Homeric system of literary representation of hero and his fate, together with its social role, lost context in the fifth century Athens. When traditional beliefs were challenged and new concepts and ways of thinking arose, the old values and solutions for the hero and fate, which the Homeric epics presented, were no longer valid. In the Oedipus Tyrannus, Sophocles' portrayal of Oedipus shows his thinking on a different kind of hero and a new relation between the hero and his predicted fate. In the Oedipus Tyrannus Oedipus is a hero who outlived his good reputation and saw its dissipation. In a sense, the play demonstrates to what an extent a person is able to face the truth of one's fate, however terrible it is and whatever responsibility it incurs. Oedipus may not be a laudable hero, but his sufferings and his confrontation with fate deserves respect. It is through such a hero that Sophocles gives meaning to the life of his day.

The problem of the strange has exerted a powerful fascination on different literary traditions. In China, zhiguai (translated as “accounts of the strange”) was produced in great number, ranging from administrative reports of drought and misrule to accounts of apparently supernatural events. What makes it even more intriguing is the involvement of Confucian literati; scholars who normally did not deign to discuss the extraordinary were actively engaged in compiling these accounts. Literary criticism on zhiguai has also been a tenuous construction. Zhiguai shifts among different bibliographical categories, and was not recognized as a genre until the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). Even today there has never been scholarly consensus on its definition. Zhiguai, therefore, is strange in its content, compilation and criticism. What are these accounts? How shall we read them? By what criteria should we judge what is strange and what is not? My dissertation offers a theory of the strange by defining zhiguai as a genre. Tracing its development in classical Chinese literature, I analyze how zhiguai challenges categorical dichotomies – history vs. fiction, natural vs. supernatural, and belief vs. disbelief – and occupies a liminal status in between. The result is a reassessment of what is normal, natural and real vis-à-vis what is anomalous, supernatural and fantastic. Devising a new ontological framework – this-world and other-world(s), I argue that it is the interaction between the two – the esoteric and/or exotic and our quotidian empirical experience – that defines the genre. The theoretical part of the dissertation is complemented with two case studies – Shenxian zhuan (Traditions of Divine Transcendents), a 4th-century zhiguai collection, and various examples in contemporary Chinese cultural production from television programs to internet gossip. Through a diachronic study as such can I uncover how the strange is woven into everyday life, and how this age-old Chinese literary genre that appears to be marginalized in its own time and nearly extinct in our modern world is still thriving today.

Anger, far from being only a personal emotion, often signals a breakdown in existing societal structures like the justice system. This does not mean we should uncritically submit to our angry impulses, but it does mean that anger can reveal larger issues in the world worthy of attention. If we banish anger from the socio-political landscape, we risk losing its insights. To defend that claim, I turn to a range of sources from ancient China and Greece—philosophy, poetry, drama, and political theory—that depict and analyze anger in a variety of situations and people. My basic claim is not that anger is simply “good” or “bad” but rather that it helps reveal and clarify our values, often pointing us towards real situations deserving of our ethical scrutiny. I situate the project amidst ongoing debates in analytic philosophy of emotions and feminist philosophy, joining the conceptual precision and clarity of the former with the latter’s attention to lived experience. Such cross-cultural, multidisciplinary conceptual analysis of anger parochializes Aristotelian understandings of anger by introducing different types and functions of anger. What role does anger play, for example, in a minister rebuking the king in an ancient Chinese court? How do Greek sources depict female anger differently than male anger, and why? By using ancient and comparative sources, I show how deeply anger is shaped by particular cultural and social structures, whilst remaining recognizably anger.