Learning to Read Lu Xun, 1918–1923: The Emergence of a Readership

2002 ◽  
Vol 172 ◽  
pp. 1042-1064 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eva Shan Chou
Keyword(s):  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Modern Chinese Literature ◽  
Fourth Generation ◽  
Lu Xun ◽  
Learning To Read ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
The Creation ◽  
May Fourth ◽  
New Literature

As the first and still the most prominent writer in modern Chinese literature, Lu Xun (1881–1936) had been the object of extensive attention since well before his death. Little noticed, however, is the anomaly that almost nothing was written about Lu Xun in the first five years of his writing career – only eleven items date from the years 1918–23. This article proposes that the five-year lag shows that time was required to learn to read his fiction, a task that necessitated interpretation by insiders, and that further time was required for the creation of a literary world that would respond in the form of published comments. Such an account of the development of his standing has larger applicability to issues relating to the emergence of a modern readership for the New Literature of the May Fourth generation, and it draws attention to the earliest years of that literature. Lu Xun's case represents the earliest instance of a fast-evolving relationship being created between writers and their society in those years.

Lu, Xun (1881–1936)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Flora Xiaofang Shao
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Modern Chinese Literature ◽  
Chinese Society ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Lu Xun ◽  
Social Critique ◽  
New Culture Movement ◽  
New Literature

Lu Xun, a pre-eminent man of letters in twentieth-century China, is widely regarded as the father of modern Chinese literature. Writing during China’s tumultuous transition from a dynastic empire into modern nation-state, Lu Xun was one of the leading practitioners of the nationalist ‘New Literature’ as well as a driving force behind the iconoclastic New Culture Movement and other intellectual reforms. His works have been celebrated for their trenchant critique of the cultural malaise of Chinese society. His inimitable style of acute self-reflexivity, combined with dark sarcasm, set an example for later writers who were similarly engaged in literature as a form of social critique.

Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era

1978 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 339
Author(s):  
Howard Goldblatt ◽  
Merle Goldman
Keyword(s):  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Modern Chinese Literature ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
May Fourth

The Monster That Is History: History, Violence, and Fictional Writing in Twentieth-Century China. By David Der-Wei Wang. [Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2004. 402 pp. ISBN 0-520-23140-6.]

2005 ◽  
Vol 182 ◽  
pp. 439-441
Author(s):  
Jeffrey C. Kinkley
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Modern Chinese Literature ◽  
Past Century ◽  
Lu Xun ◽  
History And Memory ◽  
Late Qing ◽  
Eileen Chang ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
Revolutionary Literature

This celebration of modern Chinese literature is a tour de force, David Wang's third major summation in English. He is even more prolific in Chinese. Wang's command of the creative and critical literatures is unrivalled.Monster's subject is “the multivalence of Chinese violence across the past century”: not 1960s “structural violence” or postcolonial “epistemic violence,” but hunger, suicide, anomie, betrayal (though not assassination or incarceration), and “the violence of representation”: misery that reflects or creates monstrosity in history. Monster thus comments on “history and memory,” like Ban Wang's and Yomi Braester's recent efforts, although for historical reasons modern Chinese literature studies are allergic to historical and sociological methodologies.Monster is comparative, mixing diverse – sometimes little read – post-May Fourth and Cold War-era works with pieces from the 19th and 20th fins de siècle. Each chapter is a free associative rhapsody (sometimes brilliant, sometimes tedious; often neo-Freudian), evoking, from a recurring minor detail as in new historicist criticism, a major binary trope or problematic for Wang to “collapse” or blur. His forte is making connections between works. The findings: (1) decapitation (loss of a “head,” or guiding consciousness?) in Chinese fiction betokens remembering or “re-membering” (of the severed), as in an unfinished Qing novel depicting beheaded Boxers, works by Lu Xun and Shen Congwen, and Wuhe's 2000 commemoration of a 1930 Taiwanese aboriginal uprising; (2) justice is poetic, but equals punishment, even crime, in late Qing castigatory novels, Bai Wei, and several Maoist writers; (3) in revolutionary literature, love and revolution blur, as do love affairs in life with those in fiction; (4) hunger, indistinct from anorexia, is excess; witness “starved” heroines of Lu Xun, Lu Ling, Eileen Chang and Chen Yingzhen; (5) remembering scars creates scars, as in socialist realism, Taiwan's anticommunist fiction, and post-Mao scar literature; (6) in fiction about evil (late Ming and late Qing novels; Jiang Gui), inhumanity is all too human and sex blurs with politics; (7) suicide can be a poet's immortality, from Wang Guowei to Gu Cheng; (8) cultural China's most creative new works invoke ghosts again, obscuring lines between the human, the “real,” and the spectral.

Wellspring of Inspiration: TheMandarin Union Versionand Modern Chinese Poetry in the Early Twentieth Century

2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-177
Author(s):  
JOHN T. P. LAI
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Modern Chinese Literature ◽  
Chinese Poetry ◽  
Chinese Translation ◽  
Protestant Church ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
May Fourth

Coinciding with the May Fourth new cultural and literary movement, the publication of theMandarin Union Version, the vernacular Chinese translation of the Bible, in 1919 had a profound impact on the formation of modern Chinese literature. This paper examines the ways in which theUnion Versionprovided a novel source of imageries, poetic genres and worldviews for the experimentation of modern Chinese poetry during the Republican period, particularly between the 1920s and 1940s. Revering the Bible as the Holy Scripture, young Christian poetess Bing Xin (1900–99) spontaneously expressed her religious sentiments and commitment by composing a series of “sacred poems” as her own poetic response to the striking beauty of biblical images. Zhou Zuoren (1885–1967), a renowned May Fourth Chinese writer and intellectual, regarded the Bible as a treasured anthology of Jewish literature and appreciated the humanistic values embodied in the teachings of Jesus. Placing the biblical references of the wilderness, Jesus's universal love and Moses's legalistic position in the forefront, Zhou Zuoren's poem“Qilu,”or “Crossroads,” captured the perplexity of his contemporary intellectuals, Zhou himself included, in their sabbathless search for cultural rejuvenation and national salvation during the transitional and tumultuous Republican era. An ardent admirer of W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot, Chinese modernist poet Mu Dan (1918–77) studied their poetry at the Southwest United University in Kunming during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45). Imbued with biblical allusions, for instance, the fall of humankind and the loss of paradise, Mu Dan's poems, like“She de youhuo,”or “The Temptation of the Serpent,” articulate his penetrating critique of modernity. These works of poetry represent the multiple voices and diverse reactions of the early twentieth-century Chinese poets towards theUnion Versionwhich had not only firmly established its canonical status as the predominant Chinese translation of the Bible used by the Protestant Church, but also emerged as a literary tour-de-force to propel the evolution of modern Chinese poetry.

scholarly journals Gender and Superstition in Modern Chinese Literature

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (10) ◽  
pp. 588
Author(s):  
Gal Gvili
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Modern Chinese Literature ◽  
Modern China ◽  
Lu Xun ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Literary Methods ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Modern Era

This article offers a new perspective on the study of the discourse on superstition (mixin) in modern China. Drawing upon recent work on the import of the concept “superstition” to the colonial world during the 19th century, the article intervenes in the current study of the circulation of discursive constructs in area studies. This intervention is done in two ways: first, I identify how in the modern era missionaries and Western empires collaborated in linking anti-superstition thought to discourses on women’s liberation. Couched in promises of civilizational progress to cultures who free their women from backward superstitions, this historical connection between empire, gender and modern knowledge urges us to reorient our understanding of superstition merely as the ultimate other of “religion” or “science.” Second, in order to explore the nuances of the connection between gender and superstition, I turn to an archive that is currently understudied in the research on superstition in China. I propose that we mine modern Chinese literature by using literary methods. I demonstrate this proposal by reading China’s first feminist manifesto, The Women’s Bell by Jin Tianhe and the short story Medicine by Lu Xun.

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