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.

Hong Kong in the Midst of Colonialism, Collaborative and Critical Nationalism from 1925 to 1930

China Report ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-47
Author(s):  
Lin Shaoyang
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Mainland China ◽  
Cultural Nationalism ◽  
Southeast Asian ◽  
Modern Chinese Literature ◽  
Modern China ◽  
Lu Xun ◽  
Chinese Community ◽  
New Culture Movement

In the late 1920s, cultural nationalism in Hong Kong was imbedded in Confucianism, having been disappointed with the New Culture Movement and Chinese revolutionary nationalism.1 It also inspired British collaborative colonialism. This study attempts to explain the link between Hong Kong and the Confucius Revering Movement by analysing the essays on Hong Kong of Lu Xun (1881–1936), the father of modern Chinese literature and one of the most important revolutionary thinkers in modern China. The Confucius Revering Movement, which extended from mainland China to the Southeast Asian Chinese community and then to Hong Kong, formed a highly interrelated network of Chinese cultural nationalism associated with Confucianism. However, the movements in these three places had different cultural and political roles in keeping with their own contexts. Collaborative colonialism’s interference with the Confucius Revering Movement is one way to understand Lu Xun’s critical reading of Hong Kong. That is, Hong Kong’s Confucius Revering Movement was seen as an endeavour of the colonial authorities to co-opt Confucianism in order to deal with influences from China. This article argues that Hong Kong’s Confucius Revering Movement should be regarded as one of the main perspectives through which to understand Hong Kong’s educational, cultural and political histories from the 1920s to the late 1960s. Lu Xun enables us to see several links. The first link is the one connecting the Confucius Revering Movement in Mainland China, Hong Kong and the Chinese community in Southeast Asia. This leads to the second link, that is, Lim Boen Keng (Lin Wenqing), the leading figure of the Confucius Revering Movement in the Southeast Asian Chinese community who later became the President of Amoy University, where Lu Xun had taught before his first visit to Hong Kong. The third link is the skilful colonial administrator Sir Cecil Clementi, who came to British Malaya in February 1930 to become Governor after being the Governor of Hong Kong. We can observe a network of Chinese critical/resistant and collaborative nationalism from these links.

scholarly journals Lu Xun and N. V. Gogol: the unexplored field of poetry

Litera ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 19-28
Author(s):  
Anqi Li
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Russian Literature ◽  
Chinese Society ◽  
Lu Xun ◽  
Literary Language ◽  
Considerable Contribution ◽  
New Culture Movement ◽  
Similarities And Differences ◽  
Vernacular Chinese

Russian literature has had a massive impact upon the creative path of Lu Xun. The researchers of his prose (including sinologist and translator L. Z. Ėĭdlin, literary scholar L. D. Pozdneeva, writer and literary scholar Feng Xue Feng, and others.) oftentimes compared his texts with the works of Russian writers. Despite the fact that Lu Xun wrote poetry throughout his life, his poetic legacy is poorly studied. Comparative analysis is conducted on the poetry of Lu Xun and N. V. Gogol. It is noted that the poetry of both authors reflects their philosophical and cultural views. The similarity of the authors lies in the fact that each used the versification that is traditional for their culture. The content and shape of Gogol’s poetry is based on the Slavic folklore and Orthodox faith, while Lu Xun is one of the initiators of the “New Culture Movement” and is considered an innovator in the Chinese literature. He wrote prose and poetry not in Wenyan (classical Chinese), which was understood by the elite of Chinese society alone, but in Baihua (written vernacular Chinese), the new Chinese literary language. Therefore, Lu Xun made a considerable contribution to the creation of new poetry, and many Chinese literary scholars (Chang Tsao, 1962-2010, Zhu Ziqing, 1898-1948) consider him the founder of the modern versification in China. The article establishes the similarities and differences between the Russian syllabic-accentual verse poems and Chinese new poetry.

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.

Literature by Other Mediums: Revisiting Lu Xun's Preface to Outcry

2021 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 373-398
Author(s):  
Chenshu Zhou
Keyword(s):  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Media History ◽  
Modern Chinese Literature ◽  
Lu Xun ◽  
Vernacular Literature ◽  
Media Environment ◽  
Transnational Media ◽  
Lantern Slide ◽  
Literary Figure ◽  
Media Practices

Abstract By recounting how Lu Xun 鲁迅 went from studying medicine in Japan to writing for the magazine Xin qingnian 新青年 (New Youth), the preface to Nahan 呐喊 (Outcry, 1923), Lu Xun's first collection of short stories, not only presents an origin story of an important author but also contains important clues for understanding modern Chinese literature. This article offers a new reading of that canonical text by focusing on the problem of medium. Synthesizing author biography, media history, and textual analysis, it examines three intermedial references in the preface—the famous lantern slide, the modern periodical, and the recurring notion of outcry. As an autobiographical account, the preface contains narrated events that call for more media-centered analysis, including the “slide incident” (renamed “screen incident”) and Lu Xun's failed experiment with the periodical medium. Reading the preface as an act of narration, this article scrutinizes textual choices such as the confusing word dianying 电影 (film) and the outcry metaphor. The emergence of both modern vernacular literature and Lu Xun as a major literary figure, it is argued, should be historicized in a broader transnational media environment, in which diverse media practices intersected.

Lu Xun on Our Minds: The Post-Socialist Reappraisal; Chou, Memory, Violence, Queues: Lu Xun Interprets China; Davies, Lu Xun's Revolution: Writing in a Time of Violence; Cheng, Literary Remains: Death, Trauma, and Lu Xun's Refusal to Mourn

2014 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 581-587
Author(s):  
Jon Eugene von Kowallis
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Chinese Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Modern Chinese Literature ◽  
Lu Xun ◽  
The West ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
The Past ◽  
Short Time ◽  
American Academic

That American academic publishers within a short time have put out three monographs this substantial on Lu Xun (1881–1936), often referred to as the founder of modern Chinese literature, is indicative of a new enthusiasm for Lu Xun in the United States and elsewhere in the West. In Japan, South Korea, and of course the People's Republic of China, the study of Lu Xun has been an academic enterprise of considerable standing for some time already. Not that American scholars have failed to make substantial contributions to Lu Xun studies in the past, but such contributions have been relatively far between. Fortunately, there is little overlap between these three exciting new studies.

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 A Comparative Analysis of the Cultural and Psychological Characteristics of the Bottom Positions of Hu Shi and Lu Xun

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (8) ◽  
Author(s):  
Wei Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Social Development ◽  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Reference Value ◽  
Psychological Characteristics ◽  
Practical Significance ◽  
Lu Xun ◽  
Hu Shi ◽  
Important Direction ◽  
New Literature

Lu Xun and Hu Shi are both famous literary masters in China. As representatives of new literature and new culture, the cultural and psychological characteristics reflected by their works have important practical significance and can affect all aspects of social development. Providing certain reference value has become an important direction for many experts and scholars to actively conduct research. This article starts with the analysis of the cultural characters of Hu Shi and Lu Xun, focusing on the cultural and psychological characteristics of the bottom positions of Hu Shi and Lu Xun, in order to better understand Chinese literature and experience the profoundness of Chinese literature through the study of the cultural and psychological characteristics of the two literati.

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