On ethical literary criticism and moral criticism

In terms of methodology, ethical literary criticism is an approach to literary criticism developed on the basis of the introduction of ethical methods and the assimilation of them into the texture of literary critical methods. It is used not only to interpret the moral phenomena recorded in literature on a historical and dialectic basis, but also to make value Judgment of those in the present literature based on the moral values in the reality. In nature European literature since Homer's epics is ethical and thus the earliest Greek literary criticism took the standpoint of moral criticism, of which the judgment of good and evil serves as the essential criterion. Plato tended to criticize literary works based on the moral values in the reality and to judge the quality of literary works according to the moral codes of his times, and thus he took an approach of moral criticism. Aristotle, however, took a different view of literary criticism that is closer to what we advanced as "ethical literary criticism" and Poetics is the great practice of literary criticism. But the ethical literary criticism is somewhat different from that of Greek literary theorists as it could take a new approach to Homer's epics and Greek tragedies. Generally speaking, ethical literary criticism is similar to moral criticism in the object of study, but is quite different from the latter in terms of research methods, objectives and the goals they may achieve respectively. This paper is to illustrate such differences through an analysis of Shakespeare's Hamlet, in which the cause of Hamlet's tragedy does not owe to his character and complex, but to his ethical dilemma, from the perspective of ethical literary criticism. On the other hand, ethical literary criticism, with basically a historical point of view, is still open to some contemporary theories and methods such as bio-criticism so as to form a comparative viewpoint in the study of literature.