Dear MCLC list members
Please allow me to take the opportunity to announce the publication of my book:
Beyond the Iron House: Lu Xun and the Modern Chinese Literary Field. Beijing: Tsinghua University Press, 2014. 294 pp. ISBN: 978-7-302-38494-6 [written in English]
To give you some idea about the book’s content, I reproduce below the book’s preface written by Julia Lovell:
I first read Sun Saiyin’s eye-opening work on Lu Xun when I was finishing my translation of Lu Xun’s complete short stories. For months, I had been absorbed in Lu Xun’s fictional language: in trying to understand his choice of words and tone, and trying to replicate them faithfully in English. Saiyin’s work drew me back outside Lu Xun’s abstract, fictional worlds, pushing me to re-engage with the writer as an individual and with his context.
Lu Xun is broadly acknowledged both in mainland China and in Western sinology as one of the paradigmatic figures of twentieth-century Chinese literature, celebrated for his powerful diagnoses of his nation’s social and political crisis, and for his achievements in reinventing the vernacular as a literary language during the radical New Culture Movement of the late 1910s and 1920s. Like many radical intellectuals of his time, Lu Xun began to look leftwards after the rise to power of the right-wing Nationalist Party in the late 1920s. During the Mao era, Lu Xun was arguably deified as the stand-out, infallibly correct figure in modern Chinese literature. During the Cultural Revolution, anyone the writer had criticised in his prolific speeches, essays or letters was vulnerable to persecution. Sun’s great contribution is to reconstruct the man behind the political hagiography: to contextualise Lu Xun’s political and personal judgements, and to illuminate his engagements with the highly fractious literary scene of the 1920s and 1930s.
Sun Saiyin’s careful research into Lu Xun’s career stands alongside other thought-provoking rereadings of Lu Xun’s life and work that have been published in English since 2000: Bonnie McDougall’s 2002 analysis of Lu Xun’s personal life in Love-Letters and Privacy in Modern China: The Intimate Lives of Lu Xun and Xu Guangping; Eva Chou’s 2012 Memory, Violence, Queues: Lu Xun Interprets China. Sun’s project of re-examining – in their local context – the ways in which Lu Xun wrote and argued with his contemporaries is thus timely, astutely chosen, and original. By posing, in an independent and thoroughly documented way, the issue of how we should evaluate a paradigmatic figure such as Lu Xun, she opens out the issue of a modern Chinese canon, persuasively recommending additional study of new, previously neglected writers such as Gao Changhong, the young writer-critic whose conflict with Lu Xun forms the centrepiece of the book.
In many respects, Sun has gone back to first principles in making her sociological assessment of Lu Xun’s private and public persona, stripping away the assumptions and sources of bias inherent in existing scholarship, and plotting out her own conclusions, drawn from intricate and painstaking detective work on the mass of journals, letters and diaries generated by Lu Xun and his contemporaries. She demonstrates an impressive tenacity in, for example, tracing out influence, friendships and exchanges of correspondence, and in discovering the identities hiding behind the many pseudonyms used by writers of the 1920s. Through reconstructing both sides of disputes in which Lu Xun (sometimes vituperatively) engaged, she offers evidence for doubting Lu Xun’s quasi-mythical infallibility, both as a social and literary critic, and as an original artist.
To carry out such a study shows significant intellectual courage. Given Lu Xun’s canonical status both inside and outside China, undertaking a reappraisal of the man and of his place in literary history is a task that would daunt many scholars. There is an intimidating mass of material already produced upon Lu Xun, in both Chinese and Western languages; it is a very considerable feat of scholarship and independent thinking to absorb this body of work, to look so carefully at original materials, and to draw fresh conclusions. In English, Bonnie McDougall began the task of looking behind political myth-making, to depict Lu Xun as a flesh-and-blood figure, in her study of the letters exchanged between Lu Xun and his partner, Xu Guangping. Sun valuably continues this enterprise by reconsidering, even more radically, received wisdom on the nature of Lu Xun’s personality and interactions with his contemporaries.
Sun makes especial efforts to challenge portrayals of Lu Xun as a uniquely creative, original figure amongst his immediate peers, and to trace out the process by which he came to be acclaimed a “literary authority” during and after his lifetime. Her analysis raises very important questions about the construction of a modern Chinese literary canon, implicitly urging a careful re-evaluation of Lu Xun’s creative achievements and bringing other, less-studied writers (such as Gao Changhong) to critical attention. During the post-Mao period, literary scholars have been working to broaden understanding of the range of literary voices that made up 20th-century Chinese literature – a diversity that for years was obscured by the triumph of the Maoist literary line between 1949 and the late 1970s. Sun excitingly extends this wider academic project. Her research suggests many new and fruitful avenues for investigation into the richness of Chinese literature in the 1920s and 1930s: into the oeuvre of the tragic figure of Gao Changhong, and that of others like him.
Beyond the Iron House, therefore, is a fascinating study: for its fresh insights into Lu Xun’s life and times, and for the new possibilities for modern Chinese literature that it suggests. It is a crucial text for anyone interested in China’s 20th-century literary canon and its plurality of possibilities.
Julia Lovell, August 2014
About the author: Saiyin Sun did her BA degree in English at Nankai University in Tianjin, China. She received an MEd from Manchester University in the UK. From 2005 to 2009, she studied at Cambridge University and received an MPhil and PhD in Chinese Studies (Modern Chinese Literature). She then did one-year post-doctoral research at Trinity College Cambridge from 2009 to 2010. She has been teaching in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at Tsinghua University in Beijing since her return to China in 2010.