%A Haiyan Lee %T Woman, Sacrifice, and the Limits of Sympathy %0 Journal Article %D 2012 %J Front. Lit. Stud. China %J Frontiers of Literary Studies in China %@ 1673-7318 %R 10.3868/s010-001-012-0011-1 %P 184-197 %V 6 %N 2 %U {https://journal.hep.com.cn/flsc/EN/10.3868/s010-001-012-0011-1 %8 2012-06-05 %X

In both Lu Xun’s “The New Year’s Sacrifice” (1924) and Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” (1948), a woman is made a sacrificial victim by her village community, one symbolically and one literally. Using the two stories as my cross-cultural examples, I ponder the connection between the failure of sympathy and patriarchal sacrificial logic, and ask what literature can do to help create the condition of possibility for moral agency.