Lu Xun

Reference Works

Alber, Charles J. Soviet Criticism of Lu Hsun. Ph.d. Diss. Bloomington: Indiana University, 1971.

Cao Juren 曹聚仁. Lu Xun shouce 鲁迅手册 (A Lu Xun handbook). Shanghai: Bolan shuju, 1946.

Chen Jin’gan 陈金淦. Lu Xun yanjiu de lishi yu xianzhuang 鲁迅研究的历史与现状 (The history and current state of Lu Xun studies). Nanjing: Jiangsu jiaoyu, 1986.

Eber, Irene. “A Selective Bibliography of Works by and about Lu Xun in Western Languages.” In Leo Ou-fan Lee, ed. Lu Xun and his Legacy. Berkeley: UCP, 1985. 275-85.

Findeisen, Raoul. Lu Xun. Texte, Chronik, Bilder, Dokumente. Frankfurt, Basel: Stroemfeld/Nexus, 2002.

Gao Xin 高信. Lu Xun biming tansuo 鲁迅笔名探索 (An investigation into Lu Xun’s pennames) Xian: Shanxi renmin, 1980.

Ji Weizhou 纪维周. Lu Xun yanjiu shulu 鲁迅研究书录 (Bibliography of Lu Xun research). Beijing: Xinhua shudian, 1987.

Jianming Lu Xun cidian 简明鲁迅词典 (A concise dictionary on Lu Xun). Lanzhou: Gansu jiaoyu, 1990.

Lu Xun juan 鲁迅卷 (Volumes on Lu Xun). Hong Kong: Zhongguo xiandai wenxue she, 1972-.

[Abstract: multi-volume set that contains many of the important biographical and scholarly resources, particularly in book form, on Lu Xun]

Lu Xun Page (produced by the online journal, Xin Yusi; includes reports, biographical materials, criticism; in Chinese) and Lu Xun’s works).

Lu Xun wang [website in Chinese devoted to Lu Xun and sponsored by the Shanghai Lu Xun Cultural Foundation]

Lu Xun yanjiu xueshu lunzhu ziliao huibian, 1913-1981 鲁迅研究学术论著资料汇编 (A corpus of scholarship and essays on Lu Xun). 6 vols. Beijing: Zhongguo wenlian, 1985. [indispensable collections of writings on Lu Xun]

Lu Xun yanjiu ziliao bianmu 鲁迅研究资料编目 (Catalogue of research materials for Lu Xun). Shen Pengnian 沈彭年, ed. Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi, 1958. [covers materials published between 1903 and 1958].

Lu Xun yanjiu ziliao huibian 鲁迅研究资料汇编 (Catalogue of research materials on Lu Xun). 1980.

Lu Xun yanjiu ziliao suoyin 鲁迅研究资料索引 (Index of research materials on Lu Xun). 2 vols. Beijing: Renmin wenxue, 1982.

Lu Xun zuopin cidian 鲁迅作品词典 (Dictionary of Lu Xun’s works). Kaifeng: Henan jiaoyu, 1990. [contains sections on works, characters, historical figures, events, literary factions and journals, expressions and allusions]

McDougall, Bonnie S. “Index to Letters between Two.” MCLC Resource Center Publication, 2004

[Abstract: this index supplants the incorrect index mistakenly published in the original English language translation [Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2000] of this collection of letters between Lu Xun and Xu Guangping]

Peng Xiaoling 彭小苓 and Han Aili 韩蔼丽, eds. Ah Q qishi nian 阿Q七十年 (Seventy years of Ah Q). Beijing: Shiyue, 1993.

[Abstract: collection of writings by Lu Xun and other writers and intellectuals about Ah Q].

Shou Yongming 寿永明. Huigu yu fansi: Lu Xun yanjiu de qianyan yu qushi 回顾与反思: 鲁迅研究的前沿与趋势 (Looking back and reflecting: positions and trends in Lu Xun studies). Shanghai: Shanghai sanlian, 2010.

Wang Furen 王富仁. Zhongguo Lu Xun yanjiu de lishi yu xianzhuang 中国鲁迅研究的历史与现状 (The history and current status of Lu Xun studies in China). Hangzhou: Zhejiang renmin, 1999.

Yuan Liangjun 袁良骏. Lu Xun yanjiu shi 鲁迅研究史 (History of Lu Xun studies). Xi’an: Shanxi renmin, 1986. [survey of Lu Xun studies]

—–. Dangdai Lu Xun yanjiu shi 当代鲁迅研究史 (The history of contemporary Lu Xun studies). Xi’an: Shanxi renmin jiaoyu, 1992. [comprehensive survey of Lu Xun studies from 1949 to the late 1980s]

Zhang Mengyang 张梦阳. Zhongguo Lu Xun xue tongshi 中国鲁迅学通史 (A history of Lu Xun studies). Guangzhou: Guangdong jiaoyu, 2001.

Zhang Zuobang 张佐邦. Shensheng de jiegou: Lu Xun yanjiu de siwei shenshi 神圣的解构：鲁迅研究的四维审视 (Deconstruction of a god: four close looks at Lu Xun studies). Chengdu: Sichuan daxue, 2009.

Collections

Cris (Nahan). Tr. Sebastian Veg. Paris: Editions Rue d’Ulm, 2010. [French translation of Nahan]

Diary of a Madman and Other Stories. trs. William Lyell. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1990.

Die Methode wilde Tiere abzurichten: Erzahlungen, Essays, Gedichte. Tr. Wolfgang Kubin. Berlin: Oberbaum, 1979.

Enyuan lu: Lu Xun he tade lundi wenxuan 恩怨录: 鲁迅和他的论敌文选 (A record of enmity: selected writings in the debates with Lu Xun). Eds. Li Fugen and Liu Hong. Beijing: Jinri Zhongguo, 1996.

Errances (Panghuang). Tr. Sebastian Veg. Paris: Editions Rue d’Ulm, 2004. [French translation of Panghuang]

Jottings under Lamplight. Eds. Eileen J. Cheng and Kirk A. Denton. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017.

[Abstract: Lu Xun (1881–1936) is widely considered the greatest writer of twentieth-century China. Although primarily known for his two slim volumes of short fiction, he was a prolific and inventive essayist. Jottings under Lamplight showcases Lu Xun’s versatility as a master of prose forms and his brilliance as a cultural critic with translations of sixty-two of his essays, twenty of which are translated here for the first time.]

Letters Between Two: Correspondence Between Lu Xun and Xu Guangping. Tr. Bonnie McDougall. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2000. [an incorrect version of the index was mistakenly published in this book; for the correct version, see the MCLC Resource Center publication “Index to Letters between Two“]

Lu Xun (Huazhao.com) [contains the complete works of Lu Xun organized by previously published books, e.g., Fen, Nahan, Panghuang]

Lu Xun bowuguan ziliao chaxun zaixian jiansuo xitong 鲁迅博物馆资料查询在线检索系统 (Lu Xun Museum online search engine). Beijing Lu Xun Museum.

[user can search Lu Xun’s complete works for individual terms and names and read all the texts in the complete works]

Lu Xun quanji 鲁迅全集 (Complete works of Lu Xun). 9 vols. Beijng: Renmin wenxue, 1956.

Lu Xun quanji 鲁迅全集 (Complete works of Lu Xun). 20 vols. Beijing: Renmin wenxue, 1973.

Lu Xun quanji 鲁迅全集 (Complete works of Lu Xun). 16 vols. Beijing: Renmin wenxue, 1981.

Lu Xun quanji 鲁迅全集 (Complete works of Lu Xun). 18 vols. Beijing: Renmin wenxue, 2005. [the best of the many complete works editions; with extensive annotations]

Lu Xun yiwen ji 鲁迅译文集 (Collection of Lu Xun’s translations). 10 vols. Beijing: Renmin wenxue, 1959.

Lu Xun Selected Works. 4 vols. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1980. [first published in 1956]

Lu Xun works. Xin Yusi website. [contains most of Lu Xun’s works]

The Real Story of Ah Q and Other Tales of China. Tr. Julia Lovell. Penguin, 2010.

Selected Stories of Lu Xun. Trs. Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang. Beijng: Foreign Languages Press, 1972. [slow loading]

Werke in Sechs Bänden (Works in six volumes). Ed/tr. Wolfgang Kubin, et.al. 6 vols. Zurich: Unionsverlag, 1994.

Zhao Ruihong 赵瑞蕻, ed. Lu Xun ‘Moluo shi li shuo’ 鲁迅《摩罗诗力说》 (Lu Xun’s ‘On the Power of Mara Poetry). Tianjin: Tianjin renmin, 1982. [annotations and vernacular translation of this difficult text]

Biographical

Benton, Gregor. “Lu Xun, Leon Trotsky, and the Chinese Trotskyists.” East Asian History 7 (1994): 93-104.

Cao Juren 曹聚仁 . Lu Xun nianpu 鲁迅年谱 (A Lu Xun chronology). HK: Sanyu tushu wenju gongsi, 1972.

—–. Lu Xun pingzhuan 鲁迅评传 (Critical biography of Lu Xun). HK: Xin wenhua, nd.

Chen Shuyu 陈漱渝. Lu Xun yu Nushida xuesheng yundong 鲁迅与女师大学生运动 (Lu Xun and the student movement at Beijing Women’s Normal University). Beijing: Beijing renmin, 1978.

—–. Lu Xun zai Beijing 鲁迅在北京 (Lu Xun in Beijing). Tianjin: Tianjin renmin,1978.

—–. Lu Xun shishi xintan 鲁迅事实新探 (New explorations of the historical facts about Lu Xun). Changsha: Hunan renmin, 1982.

—–. Lu Xun shishi qiuzhen lu 鲁迅事实求真录 (Record of historical facts related to Lu Xun). Changsha: Hunan wenyi, 1987.

—–. Lu Xun de fengyue xiantan 鲁迅的风月闲谈 (Lu Xun’s remarks on romance). Changsha: Hunan wenyi, 1994.

Chen, Shuyu, et.al, eds. A Pictorial Biography of Lu Xun. Beijing: People’s Fine Arts Publishing, 1982.

[Abstract: contains short biographical articles in English by Xu Guangping, Li Helin, Sun Ying, Li Zhihao, Tang Tao, Ruan Ming, Wang Yao, Ge Baoquan, Li Jiye, Cao Jinghua, Chen Shuyu, and Wang Shiqing]

Cheng Ma 程麻. Lu Xun liuxue Riben shi 鲁迅留学日本史 (A history of Lu Xun’s study in Japan). Xian: Shanxi renmin, 1985.

Cheung, Chiu-yee. “Who Invited Lu Xun to Hong Kong? An Examination of Two Accounts and Some New Materials.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 10, 3 (2016): 392-407.

[Abstract: Lu Xun visited Hong Kong in 1927 for two days and gave two very important lectures, but for several decades little was known about who made the invitation and who organized the trip. In 1981 Liu Sui claimed that it was Dr. Wong San-yin who invited Lu Xun, and Liu Sui himself was part of a reception team headed by Dr. Wong. In 1993 Zhao Jinsheng revealed that he was the person who had invited Lu Xun and organized his trip and lectures. Recently materials supporting both claims have been discovered and this paper examines these two claims, concluding that Zhao Jinsheng’s account is more reliable.]

Chih, Pien. “Herein Lies Hope: Reading Lu Hsun’s Essays on His Hopes for the Young.” In Lu Hsun: Writing for the Revolution. San Francisco: Red Sun, 1976, 93-98.

Chisolm, Lawrence W. “Lu Hsun and Revolution in Modern China.” Yale French Studies 39 (1967): 226-41.

Denton, Kirk A. “Lu Xun Biography.” MCLC Resource Center Publication (March 2002).

Doar, Bruce. “Locality as Shifting Identity: Shaoxing in Lu Xun’s Early Writing.” In Mabel Lee, Chiu-yee Cheung, and Sue Wiles, eds., Lu Xun and Australia. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly, 2016, 50-64.

Fan Cheng 范诚, ed. Lu Xun de gai guan lun ding 鲁迅的盖棺论定 (Last words on Lu Xun). Shanghai: Quanqiu shudian, 1937.

Feng Xuefeng 冯雪峰. Huiyi Lu Xun 回忆鲁迅 (Remembering Lu Xun). Beijing: Renmin wenxue, 1952.

Findeisen, Raoul. Lu Xun. Texte, Chronik, Bilder, Dokumente. Frankfurt a.M. & Basel: Stroemfeld/Nexus, 2002.

Hao, Ko. “Lu Hsun and Fang Chih-min.” In Lu Hsun: Writing for the Revolution. San Francisco: Red Sun, 1976, 201-04.

Hong, Seok-Pyo. “Lu Xun, Shin Eon-jun, and Karashima Takeshi.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 6, 3 (2012): 354-73.

Hung, Eva. “Reading Between the Lines: The Life of Zhu An.” In Christina Neder, ed. China in seinem biographische Dimensionen, Gedenkschrift fur Helmut Martin. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2001, 245-58.

Jenner, W.J.F. “Lu Xun’s Last Days and After.” China Quarterly 91 (1982): 414-45.

Jia, Helen. “Lu Xun and His Wife Zhu An.” In Mabel Lee, Chiu-yee Cheung, and Sue Wiles, eds., Lu Xun and Australia. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly, 2016, 90-92.

Jones, Gail. “The Four Dreams of Lu Xun.” In Mabel Lee, Chiu-yee Cheung, and Sue Wiles, eds., Lu Xun and Australia. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly, 2016, 93-97.

von Kowallis, Jon Eugene. “Lu Xun.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography–Chinese Fiction Writers, 1900-1949. Ed. Thomas Moran. NY: Thomson Gale, 2007, 129-50.

—–. “The Enigma of Su Xuelin and Lu Xun.” Literature and Philosophy (Wen yu zhe) 16 (June 2010): 493-527.

Krebsova, Berta. Lu Sun: Sa vie et son oeuvre (Lu Xun: his life and works). Prague, 1953.

Kuang, Yu. “Lu Hsun and His Japanese Friend.” In Lu Hsun: Writing for the Revolution. San Francisco: Red Sun, 1976, 193-96.

Last, Jef. Lu Hsun: Dichter und Idol, ein Bitrag zur Geistesgeschicte des neuen China. Berlin: Metzner, 1959.

Lee, Leo Ou-fan. “Genesis of a Writer: Notes on Lu Xun’s Educational Experience.” In Goldman, ed. Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era. Cambridge: HUP, 1977, 161-88.

Li Helin 李何林, ed. Lu Xun nianpu 鲁迅年谱 (Chronicle of Lu Xun’s life). 4 vols. Beijing: Renmin wenxue, 2000.

Li, Hsi-fan. “Landmarks in the Life of a Great Writer–On Rereading the Four Prefaces by Lu Hsun.” In Lu Hsun: Writing for the Revolution. San Francisco: Red Sun, 1976, 18-26.

Lin Jiye 李霁野. Lu Xun xiansheng yu Weiming she 鲁迅先生与未名社 (Lu Xun and the Unnamed Society). Beijing: Renmin wenxue, 1984.

Lin Fei 林菲 and Liu Zaifu 刘再复. Lu Xun zhuan 鲁迅传 (Biography of Lu Xun). Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue, 1981.

Lin, Zhihao. La vie de Lu Xun. 2 vols. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1990.

Liu, Yiwen. “Witnessing Death: The Circulation of Lu Xun’s Postmortem Image.” TAP: Trans Asia Photography Review 9, 2 (Spring 2019).

Lu Xun Biography (Pegasos Website, Findland)

Lu Xun Page (Tim Gallaher) [contains biographical sketch and links to Lu Xun’s works]

Lu Xun Museum Group. “A Wooden Board.” In Lu Hsun: Writing for the Revolution. San Francisco: Red Sun, 1976, 188-92.

—–. “The History of a Sketch Map.” In Lu Hsun: Writing for the Revolution. San Francisco: Red Sun, 1976, 197-200.

Lu Xun Posters (Stefan Landsberger’s Propaganda Posters).

Lu Xun: Writing the Story of New China. The Forum, BBC World Service (Feb. 2019).

[Quentin Cooper talks to Professor Eileen Cheng, the author of acclaimed new translations of Lu Xun into English, Ohio State University Professor Kirk Denton, one of today’s leading Lu Xun scholars, Professor Hu Ying from University of California who studies the culture of early 20th century China, and writer Yiyun Li. The reader is Paul Courtenay Hyu]

McDougall, Bonnie S. Love-Letters and Privacy in Modern China: The Intimate Lives of Lu Xun and Xu Guangping. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002.

—–. “Brotherly Love: Lu Xun, Zhou Zuoren, and Zhou Jianren.” In Christina Neder et al. eds., China in Seinen Biographischen Dimension: Gedenkscrift fur Helmut Martin. Weisbaden: Harrossowitz Verlag, 2001, 259-76.

Mills, Harriet. “Lu Xun: Literature and Revolution–From Mara to Marx.” In Goldman, ed. Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977, 189-220.

Ni Moyan 倪墨炎. Lu Xun geming huodong kaoshu 鲁迅革命活动考述 (An investigation of Lu Xun’s revolutionary activities). Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi, 1984.

Pickowicz, Paul. “Lu Xun Through the Eyes of Qu Qiubai.” Modern China 2, 3 (July 1976): 327-68.

Pollard, David E. “The Life of Lu Xun as Told in China.” In Christina Neder, ed. China in seinem biographische Dimensionen, Gedenkschrift fur Helmut Martin. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2001, 239-44.

—–. The True Story of Lu Xun. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2002. [MCLC Resource Center Publications review by Nicholas Kaldis].

Robins, Christopher. “Japanese Visions of Lu Xun in the Light of the Magic Lantern Incident.” The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus (Feb. 2007).

Scott, Paul. “Uchiyama Kanzô: A Case Study in Sino-Japanese Interaction.” Sino-Japanese Studies 2, 2 (May 1990): 47-56.

Shih, Yi-ko. “Create a Host of New Fighters–Lu Hsun’s Care for the Younger Generation.” In Lu Hsun: Writing for the Revolution. San Francisco: Red Sun, 1976, 78-84.

—–. “The First Thunder in Spring.” In Lu Hsun: Writing for the Revolution. San Francisco: Red Sun, 1976, 175-80.

—–. “In the Forefront of the Battle Against Confucianism.” In Lu Hsun: Writing for the Revolution. San Francisco: Red Sun, 1976, 181-87.

—–. “Thinking of Yenan.” In Lu Hsun: Writing for the Revolution. San Francisco: Red Sun, 1976, 205-07.

Wang, Chi-chen. “Lusin: A Chronological Record, 1881-1936.” China Institute Bulletin 3 (Jan. 1939): 99-125.

Wang, Gungwu. “Lu Xun, Lim Boon Keng and Confucianism.” Papers on Far Eastern History 39 (1989): 75-91.

Wang, Shiqing. Lu Xun, a Biography. Trs. Bonnie S. McDougall and Tang Bowen. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1984.

Wang Xiaoming 王晓明. Wufa zhimian de rensheng: Lu Xun zhuan 无法直面的人生: 鲁迅传 (A life that cannot be faced directly: a biography of Lu Xun). Taibei: Yeqiang, 1992.

Wang, Xuefu. “Spiritual Warrior in Search of Meaning: An Existential View of Lu Xun Through His Life Incidents and Analogies.” In Louis Hoffman, Mark Yang, Francis J. Kaklauskas, and Albert Chan, eds. Existential Psychology East-West. Colorado Springs: University of the Rockies Press, 2009, 149-64.

Wang Zhenzhong 王振忠. Shaoxing shiye 绍兴师爷 (Shaoxing political consultants). Fuzhou: Fujian renmin, 1994. [not a study of Lu Xun, but offers good background to the shi ye tradition, of which some see Lu Xun a part]

Weiss, Ruth. “The Early Years of Lu Hsun.” Eastern Horizon 14, 5 (1975).

—–. “The Last Decade of Lu Hsun’s Life.” Eastern Horizon 15, 4 (1976).

—–. Lu Xun: A Chinese Writer for All Times. Beijing: New World Press, 1985.

Xu Shoushang 許壽裳 . Wo suo renshi de Lu Xun 我所认识的鲁迅 (The Lu Xun I knew). Beijing, 1952.

—–. Wangyou Lu Xun yinxiang ji 亡友鲁迅印象记 (Impressions of my late friend Lu Xun). Hong Kong, 1973.

—–. “Lu Xun nianpu” 鲁迅年谱 (Lu Xun chronology). Xin Yusi website.

Zhou, Jianren (Chou Chien-jen). An Age Gone By: Lu Xun’s Clan in Decline. Beijing: New World Press, 1988.

Zhou Xiashou 周遐寿 (Zhou Zuoren) 周作人. Lu Xun xiaoshuo li de renwu 鲁迅小说里的人物 (Characters in Lu Xun’s stories). Shanghai: Shanghai chuban gongsi, 1954.

—–. Lu Xun de gujia 鲁迅的故家 (Lu Xun’s old home). HK: Datong shuju, 1962.

General Studies

Anderson, Marston. The Limits of Realism: Chinese Fiction in the Revolutionary Period. Berkeley: UCP, 1990.

Ah Q Performance Project (Dept of World Arts and Culture, UCLA).

Behrsing, Siegfried. “Lu Xun und das ‘kindliche Herz.'” Archiv Orientalni 59 (1991): 122-31.

Lu Xun: Le Legs d’un Ecrivain. Ed. Association Belgique-Chine. Brussels: Association Belgique-Chine, 1986.

Cao, Zhenhua. “My View on the Appropriation of Lu Xun.” Tr. Lin Qingxin. In Q. S. Tong, Wang Shouren, and Douglass Kerr, eds. Critical Zone 2: A Forum of Chinese and Western Knowledge. HK: Hong Kong UP, 2006, 235-44.

Castro, Brian. “Diary of a Rational Man: A Paranormal Entry.” In Mabel Lee, Chiu-yee Cheung, and Sue Wiles, eds., Lu Xun and Australia. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly, 2016, 11-19.

Chan, Roy Bing. “Conclusion: Lu Xun and the Dreams of Politics and Literature.” In Chan, The Edge of Knowing: Dreams, History, and Realism in Modern Chinese Literature. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 176-80.

Chen, Guangchen. “The Infinite Collection and the Mortal Collector: Lu Xun, Antique Market Revolutionary.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 32, 1 (Spring 2020): 108-137.

Chen, Pearl Hsia. The Social Thought of Lu Hsun, 1881-1936. NY: Vantage, 1976.

Chen, Pingyuan. “Taste and Resistance: Lu Xun’s Scholarly Style and Its Reception.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 1, 2 (May 2007): 213-49.

Chen, Shuyu. “Thoughts Provoked by the Shouhuo Essays: My View on the Hot Spots in Current Lu Xun Studies.” Tr. Lin Qingxin. In Q. S. Tong, Wang Shouren, and Douglass Kerr, eds. Critical Zone 2: A Forum of Chinese and Western Knowledge. HK: Hong Kong UP, 2006, 217-26.

Cheng, Eileen. Literary Remains: Death, Trauma, and Lu Xun’s Refusal to Mourn. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2013. [MCLC Resource Center review by Yiju Huang]

[Abstract: Lu Xun . . . is commonly cast in the mold of a radical iconoclast who vehemently rejected traditional culture. The contradictions and ambivalence so central to his writings, however, are often overlooked. Challenging conventional depictions, Eileen J. Cheng’s innovative readings capture Lu Xun’s disenchantment with modernity and his transformative engagements with traditional literary conventions in his “modern” experimental works. Lurking behind the ambiguity at the heart of his writings are larger questions on the effects of cultural exchange, accommodation, and transformation that Lu Xun grappled with as a writer: How can a culture estranged from its vanishing traditions come to terms with its past? How can a culture, severed from its roots and alienated from the foreign conventions it appropriates, conceptualize its own present and future? Literary Remains shows how Lu Xun’s own literary encounter with the modern involved a sustained engagement with the past. His creative writings–which imitate, adapt, and parody traditional literary conventions–represent and mirror the trauma of cultural disintegration, in content and in form. His contradictory, uncertain, and at times bizarrely incoherent narratives refuse to conform to conventional modes of meaning making or teleological notions of history, opening up imaginative possibilities for comprehending the past and present without necessarily reifying them. Behind Lu Xun’s “refusal to mourn,” that is, his insistence on keeping the past and the dead alive in writing, lies an ethical claim: to recover the redemptive meaning of loss. Like a solitary wanderer keeping vigil at the site of destruction, he sifts through the debris, composing epitaphs to mark both the presence and absence of that which has gone before and will soon come to pass. For in the rubble of what remains, he recovered precious gems of illumination through which to assess, critique, and transform the moment of the present. Literary Remains shows how Lu Xun’s literary enterprise is driven by a “radical hope”–that, in spite of the destruction he witnessed and the limits of representation, his writings, like the texts that inspired his own, might somehow capture glimmers of the past and the present, and illuminate a future yet to unfold.]

—–. “Records of a Minor Historian: Lu Xun on Zhang Taiyan.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 7, 3 (2013): 367-95.

[Abstract: Lu Xun, nearing his death, wrote two essays commemorating Zhang Taiyan. Both are rather unconventional eulogies, which engage the style, themes, and conventions of traditional biographies. Keenly aware of the depictions of his teacher as a conservative Confucian scholar and a political reactionary, Lu Xun provides a counter image. By associating his teacher with prominent revolutionaries and framing his idiosyncratic behaviors and political choices in later life as the product of failed ambition, Lu Xun harks back to the figure of the “mad genius” lauded as exemplars in the classical literary tradition, an image that resonates as well with the gallery of “modern” misanthropes and madmen in his short stories. Cast within a lineage of awakened eccentrics often deemed insane in their own times, Zhang emerges in Lu Xun’s essays as a revolutionary par excellence: an outspoken rebel who, after the founding of the Republic, remained a fearless critic of the establishment; an uncompromising radical at heart, who remained committed to the ideals of a true social transformation long since forgotten by those around him. In making the “worthiness” and relevance of Zhang Taiyan as a historical figure legible to modern readers through his engagement with traditional biographical conventions, Lu Xun also affirms the value of a traditional literati culture which continued to structure his worldview as a modern intellectual and writer. For his portrait of the “master of classical studies” as a radical revolutionary, however partial, was an attempt to ensure that Zhang’s name would remain relevant to posterity, leaving open the possibility that his teacher’s “precious records” might also be transmitted and still find knowing readers in later ages.]

—–. “‘In Search of New Voices from Alien Lands’: Lu Xun, Cultural Exchange, and the Myth of Sino-Japanese Friendship.” Journal of Asian Studies 73, 3 (Aug. 2014): 589-618.

[Abstract: Lu Xun, a lifelong translator dedicated to introducing foreign thought, “ searched for new voices from alien lands” to reinvigorate indigenous culture. Yet, his attitude toward cultural exchange was an ambivalent one. Among the questions that preoccupied him: How are foreign discourses, technologies, and knowledge appropriated and disseminated? Do they enable new frameworks for understanding the self and the world and forward an emancipatory agenda? Or legitimize systems of oppression? While Lu Xun’ s essays and short stories largely affirm the latter, “ Mr. Fujino” imagines a paradigm of relationality that goes beyond the limits of nationalist and colonial discourse. The sentimental account mythologizing his friendship with his Japanese anatomy teacher— one that draws on Confucian notions of benevolence and reciprocity— and, in turn, the positive sentiments and cross-cultural encounters the story has generated, reflects, and in a certain sense, enacts, Lu Xun’ s more sanguine visions of the transformative possibilities of cultural exchange]

—–. “Performing the Revolutionary: Lu Xun and the Meiji Discourse on Masculinity.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 27, 1 (Spring 2015): 1-43.

—–. “Lu Xun and the Afterlife of Texts.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 432-36.

Cheng Ma 程麻. Goutong yu gengxin: Lu Xun yu Riben wenxue guanxi fawei 沟通与更新: 鲁迅与日本文学关系发微 (Communication and renewal: exploring Lu Xun’s relationship with Japanese literature). Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue, 1990.

Cheng, Maorong. “The Didactic and the Expressive: Some Reflections on Lu Xun’s Conception of Literature.” B.C. Asian Review 9 (1995/96).

Cheung, C[hiu].Y[ee]. “Lu Hsun and Nietzsche: Influence and Affinity after 1927.” Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia 18/19 (1986/87): 21-38.

—–. “Beyond East and West: Lu Xun’s Apparent ‘Iconoclasm’ and his Understanding of the Problem of Chinese Traditional Culture.” Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia 20/21 (1988/89): 1-20.

—–. “Tracing the ‘Gentle’ Nietzsche in Early Lu Xun.” In Findeison and Gassmann, eds., Autumn Floods: Essays in Honour of Marian Galik. Bern: Peter Lang, 1997.

—–. “The Nietzsche of Chinese Lu Xun Studies: A Zigzag Road of the Reception of the ‘Gentle’ Nietzsche.” In Ricardo K. S. Mak and Danny S. L. Paau, eds., Sino-German Relations since 1800: Multidisciplinary Explorations. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2000, 167-85.

—–. Lu Xun: The Chinese ‘Gentle’ Nietzsche. Frankfurt, et al.: Peter Lang, 2001.

—–. “Lu Xun’s View of the Awakening of the Chinese People–Was There Really an ‘Epistemological Break’?” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 6, 3 (2012): 410-25.

—–. “My Journey with Lu Xun.” In Mabel Lee, Chiu-yee Cheung, and Sue Wiles, eds., Lu Xun and Australia. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly, 2016, 20-27.

Chien, Ying-Ying. “Feminism and China’s New ‘Nora’: Ibsen, Hu Shi, and Lu Xun.” The Comparatist 19 (1995): 97-113.

Chou, Chien-jen [Zhou Jianren]. “Learn from Lu Hsun’s Tenacity in Fighting and Forging Ahead.” Chinese Literature 5-6 (1977): 61-65.

—–. “Learn From Lu Hsun–Repudiate Revisionism.” Chinese Literature 6 (June 1971): 81-91.

Chou, Chih-p’ing. “Two Versions of Modern Chinese History: a Reassessment of Hu Shi and Lu Xun.” In Carlos Yu-Kai Lin and Victor H. Mair, eds., Remembering May Fourth: The Movement and Its Legacy. Leiden: Brill, 2020, 75-94.

Chou, Eva Shan. Memory, Violence, Queues: Lu Xun Interprets China. Ann Arbor: Association for Asian Studies, 2012.

[Abstract: takes a new look at the writer whose name is synonymous with the radical newness of modern Chinese literature. It identifies key moments in Lu Xun’s creative development and places them in the context of the turbulent era in which China became a republic. The result is a fresh and nuanced interpretation of a range of works, from fiction and essays to classical poems. The analyses highlight the writer’s engagement with epochal political events–the discarding of the queue style of hair, the failed monarchical restoration of Zhang Xun, the Five Martyrs incident of the leftist literary movement, and the parallel movement in art. A distinctive feature is the extensive use of visual materials and contemporary photographs. Through her original approach, Eva Shan Chou restores historical complexity to the literary conscience of modern China.

—–. “The Political Martyr in Lu Xun’s Writings.” Asia Major 12, 2 (2001).

—–. “Learning to Read Lu Xun, 1918-1923: The Emergence of a Readership.” The China Quarterly 172 (Dec. 2002): 1042-64.

—–. “Literary Evidence of Continuities from Zhou Shuren to Lu Xun.” The Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 59, 2 (2005): 49-66.

[Abstract: This article presents new evidence showing connections between Zhou Shuren and the modern writer that he became. It identifies continuities between a classical-language essay by Zhou, “An Account of Excursions in the Year 1911,” published in 1912, and two of Lu Xun’s best-know vernacular language short stories: “Hometown” (1921) and “New Year’s Sacrifice” (1924). The connections show an obscure essay to be significant, they shed light on key moments in two much-analyzed stories, and they increase our understanding of a major figure–from abstract].

—–. “‘A Story about Hair’: A Curious Mirror of Lu Xun’s Pre-Republican Years.” Journal of Asian Studies 66, 2 (May 2007): 421-59.

[Abstract: This article examines the subject of queues in the life and writings of Lu Xun (1881–1936), the most prominent figure in modern Chinese literature. The long-standing reluctance of readers and critics to associate this backward hairstyle with Lu Xun’s iconic figure has restricted our understanding of the topic to two well-known satirical portraits in his short fiction, Ah Q and Sevenpounder. This article, however, proposes that the queue is of more than satiric interest—that the author’s own experience raises fundamental questions about how he discloses and transmutes certain experiences in his writings. Starting from some little-studied events featuring queues in his pre-Republican years and a puzzling short story that recounts them, this essay analyzes the queue’s autobiographical connections and their varied literary manifestations. It also makes a case for reexamining the uses of autobiography for a writer whose life story is an important part of his influence.]

—–. “The End of Fiction, the Start of Politics: Lu Xun in 1926-1927.” Sino-Platonic Papers 266 (Jan. 2017).

[Abstract: Two events relating to Lu Xun occurred in 1926–1927 that bear on his literary biography and on political readings of Republican-era literary history. First, his fiction, which formed the core of his exceptional influence, came to an end; second, he made his first overt steps towards an explicit political commitment to the left. The end of Lu Xun’s fiction has been largely passed over for lack of explicit evidence, whereas his choice in political orientation is much studied as a critical factor in leftist literary history. This paper aims to bring the two actions into equal visibility, and by doing so, to enable the cessation of his fiction to revise our view of his turn to politics. It proposes that he did in fact make a kind of farewell to fiction, identifies the pertinent works, pinpoints and analyzes the oblique language employed, and proposes a relatively short period for this change. This conjecture uses puzzling passages from his fictional works and essays, as well as letters, diaries, and insider gossip. Their analysis re-contextualizes our view of Lu Xun’s acknowledged prominent role in the development of leftist literature.]

Chow, Rey. Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ehtnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema. NY: Columbia UP, 1995. [part 1 contains a very interesting reading of Lu Xun’s “Preface to Nahan” and his viewing of the execution slide]

Commemorating Lu Hsun: Our Forerunner in the Cultural Revolution. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1967. First published as “In Commemoration of Lu Hsun.” Chinese Literature 1 (1967): 1-90.

[Abstract: contains memorials by Yao Wenyuan, Huang Pingwen, Liu Lu, Xu Guangping, Guo Moruo, and Chen Boda, as well as some essays by Lu Xun; excellent source for Cultural Revolution canonization of Lu Xun]

Conlon, Stephen. “Reading Lu Xun in Sydney during the 1970s: Prefigural Memories.” In Mabel Lee, Chiu-yee Cheung, and Sue Wiles, eds., Lu Xun and Australia. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly, 2016, 28-36.

Cui, Wenjin. “The ‘Symbol of Angst’ and the Poetics of Remembrance: Lu Xun and Chinese Literary Modernity.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 28, no.2 (Fall 2016): 139-82.

—–. Lu Xun’s Affirmative Biopolitics: Nothingness and the Power of Self-Transcendence. London, New York: Routledge, 2022.

[Abstract: This book explores an extraordinary case of affirmative biopolitics through the study of Lu Xun (1881–1936), the most prominent cultural figure of modern China. Diverging from the Enlightenment-humanist framework in reference to which Lu Xun is commonly understood, it demonstrates how his thinking is defined by a naturalistic conception of culture that is best understood in the global context of what Foucault defines as the biological turn of modernity. In comparison to ontologically-grounded modern Western theories of life, it brings to light the deep connection between Lu Xun’s affirmative biopolitics and the epistemic ground of Chinese tradition―what is known as correlative thinking. Combining close readings of literary texts with a theoretical consideration of broader issues of culture, this book is an essential read for scholars and students who are interested in Lu Xun, modern Chinese intellectual history, comparative studies of Chinese and Western thought, and the question of affirmative biopolitics.]

—–. “‘Usefulness without Use,’ Or, the Power of the Virtual: Lu Xun on the Vital Efficacy of Literature.” CLEAR 44 (Dec. 2022).

Davies, Gloria. Lu Xun’s Revolution: Writing in a Time of Violence. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013. [MCLC Resource Center review by Eileen J. Cheng]

[Abstract: Widely recognized as modern China’s preeminent man of letters, Lu Xun (1881–1936) is revered as the voice of a nation’s conscience, a writer comparable to Shakespeare and Tolstoy in stature and influence. Gloria Davies’s portrait now gives readers a better sense of this influential author by situating the man Mao Zedong hailed as “the sage of modern China” in his turbulent time and place. In Davies’s vivid rendering, we encounter a writer passionately engaged with the heady arguments and intrigues of a country on the eve of revolution. She traces political tensions in Lu Xun’s works which reflect the larger conflict in modern Chinese thought between egalitarian and authoritarian impulses. During the last phase of Lu Xun’s career, the so-called “years on the left,” we see how fiercely he defended a literature in which the people would speak for themselves, and we come to understand why Lu Xun continues to inspire the debates shaping China today. Although Lu Xun was never a Communist, his legacy was fully enlisted to support the Party in the decades following his death. Far from the apologist of political violence portrayed by Maoist interpreters, however, Lu Xun emerges here as an energetic opponent of despotism, a humanist for whom empathy, not ideological zeal, was the key to achieving revolutionary ends. Limned with precision and insight, Lu Xun’s Revolution is a major contribution to the ongoing reappraisal of this foundational figure.]

—–. “Two or Three Things I Learned from Lu Xun.” In Mabel Lee, Chiu-yee Cheung, and Sue Wiles, eds., Lu Xun and Australia. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly, 2016, 37-49.

—–. “Lu Xun in 1966: On Valuing a Maoist Icon.” Critical Inquiry 46, 3 (2020): 515-35.

[Abstract: 1966, the inaugural year of China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, was also the thirtieth anniversary of Lu Xun’s death. Quotations from and praise of China’s best known and preeminent modern writer were in abundance that year and an official commemorative event, reportedly attended by more than seventy thousand people, was held in Beijing. The anniversary date presented the Maoist state with a prime opportunity for boosting the cultural and intellectual authority of their doctrinal assertions by association with Lu Xun. In asking what Lu Xun was in 1966, I seek to bring to view the thingness of his afterlife (or afterlives) under CCP rule. This paper discusses how the Maoist treatment of Lu Xun turned him into a political icon, to add aesthetic value to Mao Zedong Thought. Insofar as aesthetics turns on what can be felt, heard, seen, sensed, touched, or imagined, aestheticization is generally accompanied by a certain process of reification. I thus consider the concrete instances by which people came to experience Lu Xun—such as selected quotations from Lu Xun, Chairman Mao’s formulations about Lu Xun, and images of the writer in poster art—focusing in particular on the widely publicized speeches presented at the official commemoration of his death in October 1966. Since the 1980s, these 1966 commemorations have been routinely disparaged in China as an aberration. To take the Maoist version of Lu Xun seriously as the careful construction of an aesthetic object is to do more than elucidate its ideological abuse of Lu Xun. By engaging productively with the Maoist craving for an ideal revolutionary comportment, we may yet catch a glimpse of the kind of world it took for Lu Xun to make sense as a Maoist icon. Without this Maoist intensity of feeling, there would not have been the post-Maoist preoccupation with recovering or defending, as it were, Lu Xun’s true or real form (if such a phenomenologically pure act is even possible).]

Denton, Kirk A. “Lu Xun, Returning Home, and May Fourth Modernity.” In Carlos Rojas and Andrea Bachner, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Literatures. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, 19-38.

Dooghan, Daniel M. Literary Cartographies: Lu Xun and the Production of World Literature. Ph. D. diss. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2011. [Dissertations Review by Lucas Klein]

—–. “Old Tales, Untold: Lu Xun against World Literature.” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 14, 1 (Summer 2017): 31-64.

[Abstract: Tensions between global and local, history and modernity were crucial to the formation of modern Chinese literature, and have taken on exciting new dimensions as the economic power of China’s domestic market grows. What has developed far less, I argue, is our recognition of the assumptions of centrality implicit in most understandings of world literature, which the canonization of Lu Xun illustrates. The parallel (and in many cases overlapping) growth of world literature and translation studies represents a powerful theoretical evolution of comparative literature, but perennial questions of who compares and what world remain salient. These seem particularly important in discussing contemporary world literature as the very term suggests homogeneity. Difference can be assumed when dealing with works of the remote past, especially those predating imperial contacts. However, the emergence of a world literary market suggests the possibility of a singular world literature. This could be the totality of global literary production, but it isn’t. Nor is it consistent: much work is done by scholars, translators, and editors to establish the worldliness of a particular author or work. Lu Xun is part of world literature, but what Lu Xun and why?]

Farquhar, Mary Ann. “Lu Xun and the World of Children.” In Farquhar, Children’s Literature in China from Lu Xun to Mao Zedong. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1999, 26-90. [several chapters on Lu Xun]

Feng, Jicai. “Lu Xun’s Achievements and Weaknesses.” Tr. Lin Qingxin. In Q. S. Tong, Wang Shouren, and Douglass Kerr, eds. Critical Zone 2: A Forum of Chinese and Western Knowledge. HK: Hong Kong UP, 2006, 202-08.

Feng, Peter. “The Question of Lu Xun’s Right to Likeness: Intellectual Property and China.” Harvard China Review.

Findeisen, Raoul. Lu Xun. Texte, Chronik, Bilder, Dokumente. Frankfurt a.M. & Basel: Stroemfeld/Nexus, 2002.

—–. “How I Came to Do Lu Xun Research.” Studia Orientalia Slovaca 13, 1 (2014).

Fokkema, Douwe W. “Lu Xun: The Impact of Russian Literature.” In Merle Goldman, ed., Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1977, 89-103.

Foster, Paul B. Lu Xun, Ah Q, “The True Story of Ah Q” and the National Character Discourse in Modern China. Ph.D. diss. The Ohio State University, Columbus, 1996.

—–. “The Ironic Inflation of Chinese National Character: Lu Xun’s International Reputation, Roman Rolland’s Critique of ‘The True Story of Ah Q,’ and the Nobel Prize.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 13, 1 (Spring 2001): 140-68.

—–. “Ah Q Progeny–Son of Ah Q, Modern Ah Q, Miss Ah Q, Sequels to Ah Q–Post-1949 Creative Intersections with the Ah Discourse.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 16, 2, (Fall 2004): 184-234.

—–. “Jin Yong’s Linghu Chong Faces off against Lu Xun’s Ah Q: Complements to the Construction of National Character.” Twentieth-Century China 30, 1 (Nov. 2004).

—–. Ah Q Archaeology: Lu Xun, Ah Q, Ah Q’s Progeny, and the National Character Discourse in Twentieth Century China. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005.

[Abstract: Although Lu Xun was a leading intellectual and writer in twentieth century China, and his representative character Ah Q, hero of ‘The True Story of Ah Q,’ is considered an iconic repository of progressive Chinese thinking about the national character, few works examine the major discourses in his thought and writing relative to broader historical and intellectual currents outside the context of his politicization. Ah Q Archaeology, however, concretely situates Lu Xun’s critique of national character vis-a-vis metanarratives of nationalism and modernity through a close examination of his works in their historical context. Paul B. Foster uses a discursive approach to tie together Lu Xun’s major theme of national character critique and its fate in China’s tumultuous twentieth century. This book is an important and unique contribution to modern Chinese intellectual history and modern Chinese literature.]

—–. “Social Drama and Construction of the Ah Q Discourse: An Interdisciplinary Reading Strategy to the True Story of Ah Q and its Intertextual Derivations.” China Information 20, 1 (March 2006): 69-101.

[Abstract: This article examines the relationship between narrative and discourse through application of Victor Turner’s theory of social dramas to Lu Xun’s A Q zhengzhuan (The true story of Ah Q). Turner’s four-phase model is expanded to a fifth phase of temporal discursive reflexivity as Ah Q’s dramas are reinterpreted and reperformed in stage adaptations and literary derivatives (progeny novels) over eight decades. Foregrounded by Turner’s model, such discursive reperformances yield a highly effective reading strategy which integrates the elements of story and discourse, and thus bridges the gap between fictional literary events and the “real” meaning of events. Ah Q characteristics are reified in the process of constructing literary and social meaning as the progeny works humorously, satirically, and scathingly challenge contemporary readings of social and political history.]

Gamsa, Mark. “A Lu Xun Publishing Project: Translation as History.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 29, 1 (Spring 2017): 204-238.

Gao, Yuanbao. “A Temporary Farewell to Lu Xun.” In Mabel Lee, Chiu-yee Cheung, and Sue Wiles, eds., Lu Xun and Australia. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly, 2016, 65-75.

Ge, Baoquan. “Lu Xun and World Literature.” Social Sciences in China 3 (1981): 62-90.

Goldman, Merle. “The Political Use of Lu Xun.” China Quarterly 91 (1982): 446-61.

Goodman, David S. G. “Lu Xun in Sydney: Hope Cannot Be Said Not to Exist.” In Mabel Lee, Chiu-yee Cheung, and Sue Wiles, eds., Lu Xun and Australia. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly, 2016, 76-84.

Gu Ming Dong. “Lu Xun, Jameson and Multiple Polysemia.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature (Dec. 2001): 434-53.

—–. “Lu Xun and Modernism/Postmodernism.” Modern Language Quarterly 69, 1 (March 2008): 29-44.

[Abstract: Although Lu Xun (1881-1936) produced all his literary works in a period that coincided with the heyday of Western modernism (1910-30), scholars both inside and outside China have made few attempts to study them in the international context of the modernist movement. Because of Lu Xun’s concern with the fate of the Chinese nation and his professed intention to be its spiritual physician, critical opinion holds that his writings are primarily political and cultural in thematics and realistic in formal representation. The scholarly consensus that he is a master of critical realism remains unchanged. However, Lu Xun’s vision of literature and his writing techniques also draw on features common to symbolism, surrealism, supernatural realism, grotesque realism, magic realism, and other experimental forms. Since these are modernist, even postmodern, features, it would be of great interest to explore Lu Xun’s relationship to the modernist movement that swept the West in the early twentieth century and the extent to which his writings anticipated postmodernism. I argue that his work should be viewed as a contribution to the international modernist movement from a non-Western, Third World country. Indeed, no history of international modernism is complete if it does not incorporate the incipient modernism that Lu Xun pioneered independently of the West.]

Guo, Jian. “Lu Xun’s Demon-Exposing Mirrors.” In Mabel Lee, Chiu-yee Cheung, and Sue Wiles, eds., Lu Xun and Australia. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly, 2016, 85-89.

Hashimoto, Satoru. “Intra-Asian Reading; or, How Lu Xun Enters into a World Literature.” In Kuei-fen Chiu and Yingjin Zhang, eds., The Making of Chinese-Sinophone Literatures as World Literature. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2022, 83-102.

Healey, Cara. “Madmen and Iron Houses: Lu Xun, Information Degradation, and Generic Hybridity in Contemporary Chinese SF.” Science Fiction Studies 139 (Nov. 2019):

[Abstract: Chinese sf can be characterized by its generic hybridity: how it combines, subverts, and reinterprets conventions of both earlier Chinese literary traditions and the Western sf canon. One example of this generic hybridity is the paradigm of information degradation, a common sf trope from H.G. Wells on that shares epistemological and ontological features with the work of early-twentieth-century Chinese realist writer Lu Xun. This essay uses the information degradation paradigm to present a science-fictional reading of Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman” (1918), the first work of modern Chinese vernacular fiction and a foundational text in establishing Chinese national literature. Then, the article extrapolates how this reading of “Diary” is relevant to contemporary Chinese sf through close readings of Han Song’s “The Passengers and the Creator” (2006) and Zhang Ran’s “Ether” (2012). These stories adapt the information degradation paradigm in ways that evoke both Lu Xun and Wells and his followers, maintaining continuity with both traditions and illustrating a generic hybridity characteristic of contemporary Chinese sf that may account in part for its growing popularity.]

Ho, Felicia Jiawen. Full Spectrum of Selves in Modern Chinese Literature: From Lu Xun to Xiao Hong. Ph.d. diss. Los Angeles: University of California Los Angeles, 2012.

Hsu, Raymond. The Style of Lu Hsun: Vocabulary and Usage. HK: Centre of Asian Studies, U of HK, 1979.

Huang, Alexander C. Y. “Tropes of Solitude and Lu Xun’s Tragic Characters.” Neohelicon 37, 2 (Dec. 2010): 349-57.

[Abstract: Much ink has been spilled over how Lu Xun’s (1881–1936) political views inform his creative writing and how politics and literature are mutually implicated, but the aesthetics of his tragic narratives remains marginal in literary studies. Often lauded as the father of modern Chinese literature, Lu Xun has not only made major contributions to the formation of literary realism but also put his unique vision of tragedy into practice. At the core of his tragic poems and narratives lie the tropes of solitude. The tragic is characterized, not by tragic incident, but by void thereof, by a state of speech-less solitude and nothingness (xuwu). The aesthetic implications of such a tragic vision are twofold. The creation and consumption of literature in China during the first half of the twentieth century focused on questions of the nation and society, but Lu Xun’s solitary characters in The Weeds ask fundamental existential questions while carving a space for a new genre of writing.]

Huang, Sung-k’ang. Lu Hsun and the New Culture Movement of Modern China. Amsterdam: Djambatan, 1957.

Huang, Yiju. “Of Emptiness and Revolution: The Other Lu Xun.” Prism 17, 1 (March 2020): 35–56.

[Abstract: Lu Xun 魯迅 (1881–1936) has remained a most prominent figure in modern Chinese literary studies, but not so in modern Buddhism scholarship. This article shows the interlacing of Lu Xun’s revolutionary vision with Buddhism on three primary terrains: his indebtedness to his teacher Zhang Taiyan 章太炎 (1868–1936), his immersion in a wide range of Buddhist texts before the May Fourth movement, and a close reading of selected poems from Yecao 野草 (Wild Grass) in light of Buddhist philosophy. The author argues that Yogācāra conceptions promoted by Zhang, wanfa weixin 萬法唯心 (all phenomena are nothing but mind), bushi 佈施 (the bodhisattva ideal of sacrificial giving), and kong 空 (emptiness as boundless potentiality), greatly influenced Lu Xun’s aesthetics. Ultimately, this article shows how revolution, the dominant mode of secularism, is theistically conditioned. The Buddhist notion of emptiness, rather than an impediment to modernity, informs the worldly action of revolution and the phenomenal possibility of change.]

Isaacson, Nathaniel. “Lu Xun, Science, Fiction.” In Isaacson, Celestial Empire: The Emergence of Chinese Science Fiction. Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2017, 46-69.

Jameson, Frederic. “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.” Social Text: Theory/Culture/Ideology 15 (1986): 65-88.

Jenner, W.J.F. “Lu Xun’s Disturbing Greatness.” East Asian History 19 (June 2000): 1-26.

Jones, Andrew F. Developmental Fairy Tales: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011.

[Abstract: In 1992 Deng Xiaoping famously declared, “Development is the only hard imperative.” What ensued was the transformation of China from a socialist state to a capitalist market economy. The spirit of development has since become the prevailing creed of the People’s Republic, helping to bring about unprecedented modern prosperity, but also creating new forms of poverty, staggering social upheaval, physical dislocation, and environmental destruction. In Developmental Fairy Tales, Andrew F. Jones asserts that the groundwork for this recent transformation was laid in the late nineteenth century, with the translation of the evolutionary works of Lamarck, Darwin, and Spencer into Chinese letters. He traces the ways that the evolutionary narrative itself evolved into a form of vernacular knowledge which dissolved the boundaries between beast and man and reframed childhood development as a recapitulation of civilizational ascent, through which a beleaguered China might struggle for existence and claim a place in the modern world-system. This narrative left an indelible imprint on China’s literature and popular media, from children’s primers to print culture, from fairy tales to filmmaking. Jones’s analysis offers an innovative and interdisciplinary angle of vision on China’s cultural evolution. He focuses especially on China’s foremost modern writer and public intellectual, Lu Xun, in whose work the fierce contradictions of his generation’s developmentalist aspirations became the stuff of pedagogical parable. Developmental Fairy Tales revises our understanding of literature’s role in the making of modern China by revising our understanding of developmentalism’s role in modern Chinese literature.]

Jones, Gail. “The Four Dreams of Lu Xun.” In Mabel Lee, Chiu-yee Cheung, and Sue Wiles, eds., Lu Xun and Australia. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly, 2016, 93-97.

Jullien, Francois. Fonctions d’un classique Luxun dans la Chine contemporaine, 1975-1977. Lausanne: A. Eibel, 1977.

—–. Lu Xun, écriture et révolution. Paris: Presses de l’École normale supérieure, 1979.

Katz-Goehr, Amira. “How I Came to Translate Lu Xun.” Studia Orientalia Slovaca 13, 1 (2014).

Keaveney, Christopher T. “Uchiyama Kanzô’s Shanghai Bookstore and Its Impact on May Fourth Writers.” E-ASPAC 1 (2001).

Kelly, D.A. “Nietzsche in China: Influence and Affinity.” Papers on Far Eastern History 27 (March 1983):143-72.

—–. “A Fair Exchange: Days with Lu Xun’s Disciple Xu Fancheng.” In Mabel Lee, Chiu-yee Cheung, and Sue Wiles, eds., Lu Xun and Australia. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly, 2016, 98-102.

von Kowallis, Jon Eugene. “Interpreting Lu Xun.” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 18 (1996). [review of W. Kubin’s German translations of Lu Xun]

—–. “Festivals for Lu Xun: The ‘Lesser Tradition” and National Identity Construction.” Chinoperl Papers 20-22 (1997-99): 139-58.

—–. “Lu Xun–the Sexier Story: A Review Article.” Coldbacon.com

—–. “Lu Xun and Terrorism: A Reading of Revenge and Violence in Mara and Beyond.” In Peter Zarrow, ed., Creating Chinese Modernity: Knowledge and Everyday Life, 1900-1940. NY: Peter Lang, 2007, 83-98.

—–. “Lu Xun.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography–Chinese Fiction Writers, 1900-1949. Ed. Thomas Moran. NY: Thomson Gale, 2007, 129-50.

—–. ‘The Enigma of Su Xuelin and Lu Xun.” Wen yu zhe 16 (June 2010): 493-527. Rpt. in Literature & Philosophy, 16 (2010): 493-527.

—–. “On Translating Lu Xun.” Studia Orientalia Slovaca 11, 2 (2012): 193-213.

—–. “Rethinking China, Confucianism and the World from the Late Qing: A Special Issue on Zhang Taiyan and Lu Xun.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 7, 3 (2013): 325-32.

—–. “From America to Australia with Lu Xun.” In Mabel Lee, Chiu-yee Cheung, and Sue Wiles, eds., Lu Xun and Australia. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly, 2016, 103-117.

—–. “Takeuchi’s Lu Xun/China’s Takeuchi.” Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia 49 (2018).

—–. “Re-contextualizing Lu Xun’s Early Thought and Poetics in the Journal Henan.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 12, 3 (2018): 388-423.

[Abstract: In this paper I will re-contextualize Lu Xun’s early thought, as evidenced in his lengthy classical-style essays, which are concerned with issues in literature, philosophy, politics and aesthetics during an era when China was facing profound cultural changes. Part of their significance lies in the way they provide us with an unabashed glimpse at what Lu Xun set out to accomplish, early on, in his new-found literary career. Although they are mainly the product of his final Lehrjahre (years of study) in Japan, the fact that he chose to include the two longest of them in the very first pages of his important 1926 anthology Fen (The grave) indicates that he considered the views expressed therein neither too immature nor too passé to reprint at the height of his career as a creative writer. In fact, he wrote that one of his reasons for doing so was that a number of the literary figures and issues treated in these essays had, ironically, taken on an increased relevance for China “since the founding of the Republic.” The central concern of all the essays turns on questions of cultural crisis and transition. What I propose to do in this paper is to re-examine the essays within the context in which they first appeared, i.e., the expatriate Chinese journal Henan, then published in Tokyo as an unofficial organ of the anti-Manchu Tongmenghui (Revolutionary Alliance).]

Krebsova, Berta. “Lu Hsun’s Contribution to Modern Chinese Thought and Literature.” New Orient 7 (1968): 9-13.

—–. Lu Sun, sa vie et son oeuvre. Prague: Nakladatelstvi Ceskoslovenske Akademic Ved, 1953.

Kubin, Wolfgang, ed. Aus dem Garten der Wildnis: Studien zur Lu Xun (1881-1936). Bonn: Bouvier, 1989.

Kubin, Wolfgang. “Lu Xun’s Dreams on the Eve of May Fourth and Thereafter.” In Marian Galik, ed., Interliterary and Intraliterary Aspects of the May Fourth Movement 1919 in China. Bratislava: Veda, 1990, 59-65.

—–. “The Unfinished Text or Literature as Palimpsest towards Lu Xun and His Relevance to the Present.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 7, 4 (2013): 541-50.

Larson, Wendy. Literary Authority and the Modern Chinese Writer: Ambivalence and Autobiography. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. [Chap 4 discusses Lu Xun’s views of literature and his autobiographical writings in Zhaohua xishi]

Lee, Haiyan. “Sympathy, Hypocrisy, and the Trauma of Chineseness.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 16, 2 (Fall 2004): 76-122.

Lee, Leo Ou-fan. Voices from the Iron House: A Study of Lu Xun. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.

—–, ed. Lu Xun and his Legacy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.

—–. “Tradition and Modernity in the Writings of Lu Xun.” In Lu Xun and his Legacy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985, 3-31.

—–. “Literature on the Eve of Revolution: Reflections on Lu Xun’s Leftist Years, 1927-1936.” Modern China 2, 3 (1976): 277-326.

Lee, Mabel. “Suicide of the Creative Self: The Case of Lu Hsun.” In A.R. Davis and A. D. Stefanowska, eds. Austrina. Marricksville: Oriental Society of Australia, 1982, 140-167.

—–. “From Chuang-tzu to Nietzsche: On the Individualism of Lu Hsun.” Journal of Oriental Society of Australia 17 (1985): 21-38.

—–. “Lu Xun: Against Intellectual Paradigms.” In Mabel Lee, Chiu-yee Cheung, and Sue Wiles, eds., Lu Xun and Australia. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly, 2016, 118-26.

Leys, Simon. “Fire Under the Ice: Lu Xun.” In Leys, The Burning Forest: Essays on Chinese Culture and Politics. NY: Holt, 1983, 100-7.

Li Changzhi 李长之. Lu Xun pipan 鲁迅批判 (Critique of Lu Xun). Shanghai: Beixin, 1936.

Li, Xia. “Nora and Her Sisters: Lu Xun’s Reflections on the Role of Women in Chinese Society with Particular Reference to Elfriede Jelinek’s What happened after Nora Left Her Husband or Pillars of Society (1979).” Neohelicon 35 (2008): 217-235.

Li, Yi. “Lu Xun, a “Knot” that Pulls Together China’s Modernity.” Literature and Modern China 2, 1 (2022): 51-58.

[Abstract: The impact of Lu Xun on modern Chinese literature is complex, permeating every branch of modern Chi-nese literature and connecting them with itself as a junction. Tracing the logical web of Lu Xun’s thoughts helps reveal a grand landscape of modern Chinese literature. Lu Xun’s ability to move us with his spiritual pursuit after more than half a century symbolizes his trans-epochal value as well as our own self-growth.]

Li Zehou 李泽厚. “Luelun Lu Xun sixiang de fazhan” 鲁迅思想的发展 (A sketch of the development of Lu Xun’s thought). In Li Zehou, Zhongguo jindai sixiang shilun 中国近代思想史论 (Essays on the history of modern Chinese thought). Renmin, 1979, 439-471.

Lin, Chih-hao. “Lu Hsun, a Great Fighter Against Confucianism.” In Lu Hsun: Writing for the Revolution. San Francisco: Red Sun, 1976, 142-49.

Lin, Jui-ming. “Where There Is Rock, There Is the Seed of Fire: Lu Xun and Lai Ho.” Taiwan Literature, English Translation Series 15 (2004): 185-98.

Lin, Qingxin. “Reloading the Canon: The Fin-de-siecle Controversies over Lu Xun.” In Q. S. Tong, Wang Shouren, and Douglass Kerr, eds. Critical Zone 2: A Forum of Chinese and Western Knowledge. HK: Hong Kong UP, 2006, 181-92.

Lin, Xianzhi. “How Was Lu Xun Appropriated?” Tr. Lin Qingxin. In Q. S. Tong, Wang Shouren, and Douglass Kerr, eds. Critical Zone 2: A Forum of Chinese and Western Knowledge. HK: Hong Kong UP, 2006, 229-34.

Lin, Yu-sheng. The Crisis of Chinese Consciousness: Radical Anti-Traditionalism in the May Fourth Era. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979. [deals extensively with Lu Xun, especially chapter 6]

Liu, Jianmei. “Lu Xun’s Refusal of Zhuangzi.” Korea Journal of Chinese Language and Literature 2 (2012): 149-190.

—–. “Lu Xun: The Persistent Rejection of Zhuangzi.” In Liu, Zhuangzi and Modern Chinese Literature. NY: Oxford University Press, 2016, 59-83.

Liu, Lydia. “Rethinking Culture and National Essence.” In Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity in China, 1900-1937. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995, 239-58.

—–. “Life as Form: How Biomimesis Encountered Buddhism in Lu Xun.” Journal of Asian Studies 68, 1 (Feb. 2009): 21-54.

[Abstract: The fraught encounters between biological sciences and religions such as Buddhismhave raised philosophical issues for many. This essay will focus on one of them: Can form ground the truth of life? The author suggests that, along with the introduction of evolutionary biology from Europe, literary realism in China has emerged as a technology of biomimesis, among other such technologies, to grapple with the problem of “life as form.” Focusing on Lu Xun’s early interest in Ernst Haeckel and science fiction, especially his translation of “Technique for Creating Humans” and his narrative fiction “Prayers for Blessing,”which drew extensively on a Buddhist avadana, the essay seeks to throw some new light on the familiar as well as unfamiliar sources relating to Lu Xun’s life and works and to develop a new understanding of how the debates on science and metaphysics have developed in modern China.]

Liu, Yiwen. “Witnessing Death: The Circulation of Lu Xun’s Postmortem Image.” TAP: Trans Asia Photography Review 9, 2 (Spring 2019).

Liu, Zaifu. “Lu Xun and Chinese/Foreign Culture.” In Howard Y. F. Choy and Jianmei Liu, eds., Liu Zaifu: Selected Critical Essays. Leiden: Brill, 2021, 255-69.

—–. “Miracle and Tragedy in Modern Chinese Literature: In Honor of Lu Xun’s 120th Birthday.” In Howard Y. F. Choy and Jianmei Liu, eds., Liu Zaifu: Selected Critical Essays. Leiden: Brill, 2021, 270-93.

Loi, Michelle. Un intellectual dans la revolution chinoise. Paris: Maspero, 1977.

Lovell, Julia. “The Afterlife of Lu Xun.” LA Review of Books, China Channel (Sept. 28, 2017).

Lu Xun Criticism (Xin Yusi website) [contains numerous essays and articles in Chinese on Lu Xun, including Liang Shiqiu, Zhou Zuoren, Li Zehou, Qian Liqun, Can Xue, and Wang Shuo]

Lyell, William A. Lu Hsun’s Vision of Reality. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.

—–. “Lu Xun Today.” Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association 20, 2 (1985): 91-100.

Macdonald, Sean. “Montage as Chinese: Modernism, the Avant-garde, and the Strange Appropriation of China.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 19, 2 (Fall 2007): 151-99.

McCormack, Jerusha. “Lu Xun and James Joyce: To Heal the Spirit of a Nation.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 10, 3 (2016): 353-91.

McDougall, Bonnie S. “Lu Xun Hates China, Lu Xun Hates Lu Xun.” In Wolfgang Kubin, ed., Symbols of Anguish: In Search of Melancholy in China. Bern: Peter Lang, 2001, 385-440.

—–. Love-Letters and Privacy in Modern China: The Intimate Lives of Lu Xun and Xu Guangping. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002.

—–. “Lu Xun Travels around the World: From Beijing, Oslo and Sydney to Cambridge, Mass.” In Mabel Lee, Chiu-yee Cheung, and Sue Wiles, eds., Lu Xun and Australia. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly, 2016, 126-30.

McClaren, Anne. “Lu Xun: The Art of Catching a Ghost.” In Mabel Lee, Chiu-yee Cheung, and Sue Wiles, eds., Lu Xun and Australia. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly, 2016, 1131-42.

Medvedeva, Olga. “Lu Xun in the Rhetoric of the Sino-Soviet Split: A View from Contemporary Russia.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 7, 3 (2013): 483-93.

[Abstract: The historical role of the prominent Chinese writer, social activist and thinker Lu Xun (1881–1936), is difficult to overestimate. His works influenced social change within China and became recognized internationally. For these and other reasons, he was of particular interest in the Soviet Union. Since 1932, his works have been published in numerous editions in Russian and have received a great deal of scholarly attention in the Soviet Union. Such unprecedented attention was initially based on the idea that he held similar revolutionary sentiments to those prevailing in the Soviet Union. Later, from the second half of the 1960s to the early 1970s, the ideological disagreements between the Soviet Union and China influenced the direction of Lu Xun studies in the Soviet Union. Soviet leader Khrushchev called for peaceful coexistence with the capitalist West, while Mao Zedong stressed the universal character of the proletarian revolution. Lu Xun was highly respected in both the USSR and China, and thus became an influential tool in this polemic. But, for Soviet scholars, this renewed focus on Lu Xun offered an opportunity to provide a new perspective on the writer’s works. This paper analyzes how the Sino-Soviet split influenced Russian academics’ positions on Lu Xun. The focus is on the three main points of contention in the ideological disagreements between the PRC and the USSR. First, Soviet critics focused on the psychological aspects and individualism in the Lu Xun’s works. Second, a special focus on humanistic elements in the writer’s ideas can be seen as a result of the Soviet disagreement with the Cultural Revolution’s period. Third, by pointing to the internationalist aspects of Lu Xun’s writings, Soviet scholars attempted to expose the Sinocentric political attitudes of the ruling circles in China.]

Murthy, Viren. “Resistance to Modernity and the Logic of Self-Negation as Politics: Takeuchi Yoishimi and Wang Hui on Lu Xun.” positions: asia critique 24, 2 (May 2016): 513-54.

[Abstract: Lu Xun is perhaps the most studied figure in modern Chinese literature and there has been a great deal of debate about interpreting his work. However, scholars have paid insufficient attention to the way in which readings of Lu Xun serve as a lens from which to examine political interventions in response to global transformations and more specifically to the global logic of capitalism… Takeuchi and Wang each drew on Lu Xun to develop a new vision of politics at times when narratives and processes associated with the nation-state and capitalism eclipsed critical political practice. Intellectuals in both interwar Japan and post-Mao China stressed an evolutionary vision of modernity with which they criticized their present and immediate past: imperial fascism and feudalism in Japan, and the Cultural Revolution in 1980s and 1990s China. In both the works of Takeuchi and Wang, Lu Xun evinces a resistance to evolutionary or progressive narratives of history. In this essay, I read Takeuchi and Wang’s respective interpretations of Lu Xun as responding to the cultural logic of global capitalism. Takeuchi and Wang each appeal to feeling or irrationality to develop a vision of Lu Xun as resisting modernity. For Takeuchi, Lu Xun symbolized not only the Chinese revolution itself, but also a more fundamental defiance of European history and epistemology. Since this history as rationalizing modernity was expanding and encompassed the very formation of the self, Takeuchi argued that resistance implied self-realization through self-negation and that Lu Xun embodied this paradoxical practice. In the mid-1990s, when the neoliberal phase of capitalism was transforming social relations in China, Wang invoked Takeuchi’s interpretation of Lu Xun and more explicitly confronted the dynamic of capitalism. In Wang’s view, the nature of intellectual production in capitalist society tends to fore-close the possibility of politics. However, he claims that Lu Xun’s writings and practices represent a time when Chinese intellectuals were more closely connected to social movements and thus present the possibility of radical transformation.

Pan, Jane Weizhen. “The Lu Xun That Haunts Me.” In Mabel Lee, Chiu-yee Cheung, and Sue Wiles, eds., Lu Xun and Australia. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly, 2016, 149-56.

Park, Min-woong. “On Lu Xun’s Attitude Toward the Masses.” Chinese Culture 39, 1 (1998): 93-108.

Pickowicz, Paul. “Lu Xun through the Eyes of Qu Qiubai: New Perspectives on Chinese Marxist Literary Polemics of the 1930s.”Modern China 2, 2 (April 1976): 327-68.

Prusek, Jaroslav. “Lu Hsun the Revolutionary and the Artist.” Orientalische Literaturzeitung 5/6 (May-June 1960): 230-36.

Pusey, James Reeves. Lu Xun and Evolution. Albany: SUNY Press, 1998.

Qian, Liqun. “Refusing to Forget.” Tr. Eileen Cheng. In Chaohua Wang, ed., One China, Many Paths. London: Verso, 2003, 292-309.

—–. “The Historical Fate of Lu Xun in Today’s China.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 7, 4 (2013): 521-40.

Rahav, Shakhar. “Blade of Remembrance: Memory, Objects, and Redemption in Lu Xun.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 9, 3 (2015): 453-77.

[Abstract: Critics have observed that memory is an important theme in Lu Xun’s writings. At the same time, memory—more precisely a struggle over the shaping of cultural memory—is a vital component of the iconoclastic May Fourth Movement with which Lu Xun is strongly associated. This article examines the ways in which several of Lu Xun’s creative writings and memoirs depict memory and its transmission. I argue that, 1) These texts suggest the importance of objects as mnemonic devices that aid the transmission of memory, 2) The agency of the receiver is key in interpreting these texts and in transmitting them onward, and 3) That Lu Xun posits the texts he creates as such mnemonic objects that serve to transmit his interpretation of cultural and personal memory to his readers. Lu Xun’s texts thus implicate the reader in the author’s project of transmitting onward his reinterpretation of the past in the hope of redeeming China. Examining these mechanisms of memory transmission I conclude that for Lu Xun redemption lies not in a transcendent future but in reexamining the past.]

Rojas, Carlos. “Of Canons and Cannibalism: A Psycho-Immunological Reading of “Diary of a Madman.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 23, 1 (Spring 2011): 47-76.

Ruhlman, Robert. “Les nouvelles de Lou Sin (1881-1936).” In Etienne Balazs et al., eds., Aspects de la Chine, vol. 13 Epoque Contemporaine. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959-62, 617-628.

—–. “Lou Siun, grand ecrivain chinois du Xxe siecle.” Comptes Rendus Mensuels des Seances 24 (1964): 363-379.

Schwarcz, Vera. “Writing in the Face of Necessity: Lu Xun, Brecht, and Satire.” Modern China 7, 3 (July 1981): 289-316.

—–. “A Curse on the Great Wall: The Problem of Enlightenment in Modern China.” Theory and Society 13 (1984): 455-70.

Semanov, V. I. Lu Hsun and his Predecessors. Tr. Charlers Alber. White Plains: M. E. Sharpe, 1980.

Shen, Jiawei. “Lu Xun Is One of Us.” In Mabel Lee, Chiu-yee Cheung, and Sue Wiles, eds., Lu Xun and Australia. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly, 2016, 165-71.

—–. “Berated by Lu Xun.” In Mabel Lee, Chiu-yee Cheung, and Sue Wiles, eds., Lu Xun and Australia. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly, 2016, 172-73.

Shih, Shu-mei. “Evolutionism and Experimentalism: Lu Xun and Tao Jingsun.” In Shi, The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917-1937. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001, 73-95.

Snow, Edgar. “Lu Shun – Master of Pai-hua.” Asia 35, 1 (1935): 40–43.

Spence, Jonathan. “On Chinese Revolutionary Literature.” Yale French Studies 39 (1967): 215-225.

Stenberg, Josh. “Cutting ‘The Kite’ Strings: Rummaging through Responses to the 2013 PRC Textbook Removal of a Lu Xun Work.” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 42 (2020): 119-31.

[Abstract: This article considers the debate surrounding the 2013 removal of Lu Xun’s prose poem “The Kite” from textbooks. Supporters of the removal focused on students’ alleged inability to comprehend the text, while critics suspected that the removal might be a sign of decreasing literacy or a part of a larger movement to discourage critical thought in education. Ultimately, the state’s renewed approbation of traditional culture has weakened allegiance to Lu Xun’s critique thereof, while the recession of socialism as the centrepiece of contemporary PRC citizenship education erodes the historiographical standing of the Republican left-leaning literary establishment.]

Sun, Liying and Michel Hockx. “Dangerous Fiction and Obscene Images: Textual-Visual Interplay in the Banned Magazine Meiyu and Lu Xun’s Role as Censor.” Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature 16, 1 (March 2019): 33-61.

[Abstract: The magazine Meiyu 眉語 (Eyebrow Talk), published from 1914 to 1916 and edited by Gao Jianhua 高劍華, was China’s first literary magazine edited by a woman and targeted at a female audience. It was also the first modern magazine to pay extensive attention to nudity and to physical and romantic intimacy through at times carefully considered juxtapositions of texts and images. In addition, it was the first Chinese magazine to be banned on the basis of obscenity legislation introduced during the early Republic. The committee that banned Meiyu was led by Zhou Shuren 周樹人, who later became known as the author Lu Xun 魯迅, and his disparaging reminiscence about Meiyu caused the magazine to be all but forgotten for nearly a century. In this article, the authors use a wide variety of archival material to reconstruct the complex publishing history of the magazine, as well as the processes and cultural standards involved in its banning. This is followed by a close analysis of aspects of the contents of Meiyu, especially the interaction between texts and images in the representation of nudity, intimacy, and coupledom.]

Sun, Lung-kee. The Chinese National Character: From Nationhood to Individuality. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2001. [various sections deal with Lu Xun]

Sun, Saiyin. Beyond the Iron House: Lu Xun and the Modern Chinese Literary Field. Beijing: Tsinghua University Press, 2014. Rpt. NY: Routledge, 2017. [MCLC Resource Center review by Kirk A. Denton]

[Abstract: Beyond the Iron House is a critical study of a crucial period of life and work of the modern Chinese writer Lu Xun. Through thorough research into historical materials and archives, the author demonstrates that Lu Xun was recognized in the literary field much later than has hitherto been argued. Neither the appearance of “Kuangren riji” (Diary of a madman) in 1918 nor the publication of Nahan (Outcry) in 1923 had catapulted the author into nationwide prominence; in comparison with his contemporaries, neither was his literary work as original and unique as many have claimed, nor were his thoughts and ideas as popular and influential as many have believed; like many other agents in the literary field, Lu Xun was actively involved in power struggles over what was at stake in the field; Lu Xun was later built into an iconic figure and the blind worship of him hindered a better and more authentic understanding of many other modern writers and intellectuals such as Gao Changhong and Zhou Zuoren, whose complex relationships with Lu Xun are fully explored and analysed in the book.]

Sun, Shirley. Lu Xun and the Chinese Woodcut Movement, 1929-1935. Ph.D. diss. Stanford University, 1974.

Takeuchi, Yoshimi (Zhunei hao) 竹内好. Lu Xun 鲁迅. Tr. Li Xinfeng. Hangzhou: Xinhua, 1986. [originally published in Japanese in 1944]

—–. “Ways of Introducing Culture (Japanese Literature and Chinese Literature II)–Focussing Upon Lu Xun.” In Yoshimi Takeuchi, What Is Modernity? Writings of Takeuchi Yoshimi. Tr. Richard Calichman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005, 43-52.

Tao, Jeanne. Breaking with the Past: Memory, Mourning, and Hope in Lu Xun’s Writing. M.A. thesis. Columbus: The Ohio State University, 2005.

Tikhonov, Vladimir. “Sin Ŏnjun (1904–1938) and Lu Xun’s Image in Korea: Colonial Korea’s Nationalist Transnationalism.” Journal of Asian Studies 78, 1 (Feb. 2019): 23-44.

Tsau, Shu-ying. “‘They Learn in Suffering What They Teach in Song’: Lu Xun and Kuriyagawa Hakuson’s Symbols of Anguish.” In Wolfgang Kubin, ed., Symbols of Anguish: In Search of Melancholy in China. Bern: Peter Lang, 2001, 441-69.

Uhl, Christian. “Displacing Japan: Takeuchi Yoshimi’s Lu Xun in Light of Nishida’s Philosophy – and Vice Versa.” positions: east asia cultures critique 17, 1 (Spring 2009):207-238.

Veg, Sebastian. “Sortir du regne de la critique.” In Lu Xun, Cris. Paris: Editions Rue d’Ulm, 2010, 257-94.

—–. “Democratic Modernism: Rethinking the Politics of Early Twentieth-Century Fiction in China and Europe.” boundary 2 38, 3 (2011): 27-65.

Wang, Ban. The Sublime Figure of History. Stanford UP, 1997. [contains discussion of “On the Power of Mara Poetry” and Wild Grass]

—–. “Old Dreams Retold: Lu Xun as Mytho-Ecological Writer.” Prism 17, 2 (2020).

—–. “Aesthetics, Morality, and the Modern Community: Wang Guowei, Cai Yuanpei, and Lu Xun.” Critical Inquiry 46, 3 (2020): 496-514.

[Abstract: In Mao’s era, China’s policy makers and intellectuals viewed aesthetic experience and thought as handmaidens in the service of the political order. As China opened up and engaged more intensely with modern traditions of the West, aesthetic thinkers such as Li Zehou critiqued the subordinated role of aesthetics and reasserted notions of aesthetic autonomy and liberal humanism, calling for the separation of arts and literature from political, social, and moral concerns. This truncated aesthetic view stems from a modernist version of Western aesthetics that favors sense and sensibility as the sole sources of aesthetic value—a view that considerably diminishes the horizon of concerns inherent in traditional and modern Chinese aesthetic thoughts. This article seeks to recapture a repoliticized aesthetics by considering the ways early twentieth-century Chinese thinkers linked aesthetic thoughts to moral and political considerations in the reconstruction of China as a modern nation-state. Instead of transcendent, pure aesthetics over and above political processes and social experience, prominent aesthetic thinkers like Wang Guowei, Cai Yuanpei, and Lu Xun invoked traditional Chinese aesthetic legacies and reconsidered intimate and necessary ties between aesthetic categories and broader concerns about cultural crises, moral reform, and nation building.]

Wang, Chi-chen. “Lusin: A Chronological Record 1881-1936.” China Institute Bulletin 3, 4 (1939): 99–125.

Wang, David Der-wei. Fictional Realism in 20th Century China: Mao Dun, Lao She, Shen Congwen. NY: CUP, 1992. [the Introduction is centered on Lu Xun]

—–. “Lu Xun, Shen Congwen, and Decapitation.” In Xiaobin Tang and Liu Kang, eds. Politics, Ideology, and Literary Discourse in Modern China: Theoretical Interventions and Cultural Critique. Durham: Duke UP, 1993, 278-99.

Wang, Eugene Y. “Tope and Topos: The Leifeng Pagoda and the Discourse of the Demonic.” In Judith T. Zeitlin and Lydia Liu, with Ellen Widmer, eds., Writing and Materiality in China: Essays in Honor of Patrick Hanan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003, 488-552. [deals only in part with LX’s views of the collapse of the Leifeng Pagoda]

Wang, Hui. “Dead Fire Rekindled.” Tr. Julia Chan. boundary 2 34, 3 (Fall 2007): 1-21.

—–. “Lu Xun and Tombstones.” Tr. Michael Gibbs Hill. In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literature History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 306-10.

Wang, Lan. “What Lu Xun Means to Me.” In Mabel Lee, Chiu-yee Cheung, and Sue Wiles, eds., Lu Xun and Australia. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly, 2016, 174-77.

Wang, Ping. “The Inner Workings of Lu Xun’s Mind: Behind the Author’s Pen-Names.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 7, 3 (2013): 459-82.

[Abstract: Lu Xun is arguably the most prolific user of pseudonyms of all writers in the world. The question, then, is why. While the diversity and multiplicity of Lu Xun’s pseudonyms defy clear classification, a close examination reveals much more than just the erstwhile political justifications for anonymity. This article argues that Lu Xun’s pseudonyms, with their rich literary allusions, satire, and humour, shed light on his complex character, and contributed to his sophisticated writing style. Through the author’s choice of pseudonyms, we see the inner workings of his mind, hear a voice of a national conscience, and feel his intense—albeit at times ambivalent—emotions. The pen-names Lu Xun ingeniously employed constructed his image as a solitary thinker and fighter embarked on a long and difficult journey in search of light in the darkness. Indeed, not only have the pseudonyms enriched the layered significance of his writing, they also have much to tell about Lu Xun both as an author and a person: his keen awareness of social and political issues, his deep insight into the weakness of the national character, and his passionate concern for the nation, as well as his eclectic approach to both classical discourse and modern narrative. And as such, these pseudonyms should form an integral part of the many queries posed and pondered by Lu Xun studies.]

Wang, Pu. “Poetics, Politics, and Ursprung/yuan: On Lu Xun’s Conception of ‘Mara Poetry.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 23, 2 (Fall 2011): 34-63.

Wang, Qi. “The Chinese Reception of Kierkegaard.” Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception, and Resources Vol. 8, Tome 3 (2009): 103-24.

Wang, Qin. “Literary Evolutionism and Its Discontents: Between Zhou Zuoren and Lu Xun.” In Wang, Configurations of the Individual in Modern Chinese Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, 57-114.

Wang Shuo. “Lu Xun as I See Him.” Tr. Lin Qingxin. In Q. S. Tong, Wang Shouren, and Douglass Kerr, eds. Critical Zone 2: A Forum of Chinese and Western Knowledge. HK: Hong Kong UP, 2006, 193-201.

Wang Weidong 汪衛東 . Lu Xun qianqi wenben zhong de “geren” guannian 魯迅前期文本中的“個人”觀念 (The concept of “ individualism” in Lu Xun’ s early writings). Beijing: Renmin wenxue, 2006.

Wang Yao 王瑶. Lu Xun yu Zhongguo wenxue 鲁迅与中国文学 (Lu Xun and Chinese literature). Shanxi renmin, 1982.

—–. “Lun Lu Xun zuopin yu Zhongguo gudian wenxue de lishi lianxi” 论鲁迅作品与中国古典文学的历史联系 (On the historical relationship between Lu Xun’s works and Chinese classical literature). Wenyi bao.

Wong, Kam-ming. “Dotting the ‘I’: Reading Lu Xun Through the Eyes of Darwin and Nietzsche.” Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Symposium on Asian Studies. HK: Asian Research Service, 1991, 189-210.

—–. “Retroactive Lyricism/Eternal Return: Lu Xun, Darwin, and Nietzsche,(co-authored with Chung-min Tu). In Luibava Moreva, ed., International Readings in Theory, History and Philosophy of Culture. St. Petersburg, Russia: EIDOS, 2001, vol. 11: 215-256.

Wong, Winnie Won Yin. “Lantern Slide Moments and the Taught Subject, 1906 and 2006.” positions 23, 1 (Feb. 2015): 91-114.

Wu, Zhongjie. “Return to the Real Lu Xun.” In Mabel Lee, Chiu-yee Cheung, and Sue Wiles, eds., Lu Xun and Australia. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly, 2016, 189-97.

Xie, Yong. “Some Unavoidable Questions in Lu Xun Studies.” Tr. Lin Qingxin. In Q. S. Tong, Wang Shouren, and Douglass Kerr, eds. Critical Zone 2: A Forum of Chinese and Western Knowledge. HK: Hong Kong UP, 2006, 227-28.

Yang, Ye. “Lu Xun (Lu Hsün) 1881-1936.” In Olive Classe, ed., Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English (vol. 1). London/Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2000, 868–69.

Ying, Lei. “Lu Xun, the Critical Buddhist: A Monstrous Ekāyana.” Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture 3, 2 (Nov. 2016): 400-28.

[Abstract: When Lu Xun 魯迅 (1881–1936) sows in “Gudu zhe” 孤獨者 (The Misanthrope) the analogy of a seed in a conversation about the nature of children, he alludes to the epistemic seedbed other than evolutionary thinking: Buddhism. This study probes into this moment of double conjuration as religion encounters science and soteriology confronts natural law. It unravels the significance of the Buddhist reference by tracing the seed to its Yogācāra provenance and implanting it in a twentieth-century debate between the Yogācārins and the advocates of the Tathāgatagarbha doctrine across East Asia. The author situates Lu Xun in a shared intellectual horizon with the contemporary lay Buddhist scholar, Ouyang Jingwu 歐陽竟無 (1871–1943), whose critique of Dasheng qixin lun大乘起信論 (Treatise on the Awakening of Faith in the Mahāyāna, or the Awakening of Faith) in 1922 furnishes a Buddhist exemplum of the “obsession with China.” In spirit both Ouyang and Lu Xun anticipate the Critical Buddhism movement of late 1980s Japan, in which hongaku本覚, or original enlightenment thought, is censured for latent ideological complicity with Japanese ethnocentrism. Lu Xun, the author suggests, turns out to be the most critical of all Critical Buddhists. This is evidenced by his “Sihuo” 死火 (Dead Fire), which features a ghastly twist in its retelling of the burning house parable from the Miaofa lianhua jing 妙法蓮華經 (Saddharma-puṇḍarīka-sūtra; Sūtra of the Lotus of the Wonderful Dharma, or the Lotus Sūtra). Having undergone a Buddhist vita contemplativa in the preceding years of the literary revolution, Lu Xun came to personify a profound “consciousness of darkness” (youan yishi 幽暗意識) in dwelling on the karma of modernity.]

Zhang, Fugui and Chuangong Ren. “The Spread of Cosmopolitanism in China and Lu Xun’s Understanding of the ‘World Citizen.'” Frontiers of Literary Study in China 6, 4 (2012): 553-69.

[Abstract: The concept of World Citizen was not introduced to China by Lu Xun, but it is an important term in his thought. The most obvious difference between Lu Xun and other cultural pioneers during the May Fourth period is that rather than understanding and promoting cosmopolitanism as a social or systematic phenomenon, he was mainly interested in human nature and therefore attempted to formulate the concept of World Citizen in terms of a humanistic or spiritual dimension. In so doing, he profoundly expressed an ideological appeal for the significance of the human consciousness, understood within its historical context. This particular conception of cosmopolitanism is symbolically valuable and relevant to the present ideological reality.]

Zhang, Longxi.”Revolutionary as Christ: The Unrecognized Savior in Lu Xun’s Works.” Christianity and Literature 45, no. 1 (Autumn 1995): 81-93.

Zhang, Quanzhi. “Lu Xun and Orientalism.” Tr. Lin Qingxin. In Q. S. Tong, Wang Shouren, and Douglass Kerr, eds. Critical Zone 2: A Forum of Chinese and Western Knowledge. HK: Hong Kong UP, 2006, 209-15.

Zhong, Xueping. “Who Is Afraid of Lu Xun? Politics of ‘Lu Xun lunzheng’ and the Question of His Legacy in Post-Revolution China.” In Jie Lu, ed., China’s Literary and Cultural Scene at the Turn of the 21st Century. NY: Routledge, 2008, 81-102.

Zhu, Ping. “The Anamorphic Feminine: History, Memory, and Woman in Lu Xun’s Writings.” In Zhu, Gender and Subjectivities in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Literature and Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2015.

Zhu Tong 朱彤. Lu Xun chuangzuo de yishu jiqiao 鲁迅创作的艺术技巧 (The artistic techniques of Lu Xun’s creative writing). Shanghai: Xin wenyi, 1958.

Fiction

Anderson, Marsten. “Lu Xun, Ye Shaojun, and the Moral Impediments to Realism.” In Anderson, The Limits of Realism: Chinese Fiction in the Revolutionary Period. Berkeley: UCP, 1990, 76-118.

—–. “Lu Xun’s Facetious Muse: The Creative Imperative in Modern Chinese Fiction.” In E. Widmer and D. Wang, eds., From May Fourth to June Fourth: Fiction and Film in Twentieth-Century China. Cambridge: HUP, 1993, 249-68.

Brown, Carolyn. “The Paradigm of the Iron House: Shouting and Silence in Lu Xun’s Stories.” Chinese Literature Essays Articles Reviews 6.1-2 (1984):101-20.

—– “Woman as Trope: Gender and Power in Lu Xun’s ‘Soap.'” Modern Chinese Literature 4, 1-2 (1988): 55-70.

—–. Reading Lu Xun through Carl Jung. Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2018. [MCLC Resource Center review by Paul B. Foster]

[Abstract: deploys a new methodology and proposes a new model for interpreting Lu Xun’s two collections of modern short stories. The study demonstrates that in fact Lu Xun had a clear but implicit model of spiritual healing and cure. He began with the assumption that this psycho-dynamic paradigm might apply in all arenas of Chinese life and so tested out this premise imaginatively through his stories. The conclusion embedded in his fiction is that in the domains of nation and community, healing would not be possible without revolutionary change, but that healing was possible, although hardly likely, within the confines of family and the self. Viewing the stories of Call to Arms and Wandering through this lens often yields important new insights about individual stories. Even when it does not, the approach draws attention to the commonalities disguised by the great variety of plots, characters, and narrative strategies. Further, this approach incorporates and generalizes the more limited way of viewing the stories in terms of class analysis, and it complements the historical and biographical discussion of these works.]

Button, Peter. “Lu Xun’s Ah Q as ‘Gruesome Hybrid.'” In Peter Button, Configurations of the Real in Chinese Literary and Aesthetic Modernity. Leiden: Brill, 2009, 85-117. [MCLC Resource Center Publications review by Thomas Moran]

Capehart, Clint. “The Animal Kingdom in the Legacy of Modern Chinese Literature: Lu Xun’s Writings on Animals and Bio-Politics in the Republican Era.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 10, 2 (2016): 430-60.

[Abstract: Lu Xun situated himself at the crossroads of agricultural tradition and modernist inception during the tumultuous Republican period. As a result, fraught with his affection towards his origins and aiming to register his modernist sensibilities, he widely scattered various animals throughout his fiction and essays. However, more scholarly attention should be paid to the theoretical interpretations of these nonhuman historical and affective agencies and they deserve to be regarded as unique references to the social and political representations of the Republican era. This paper analyzes how Lu Xun represents animal images and discusses the relationship between animality and humanity in his writings. Employing eco-criticism and Foucauldian bio-politics, I argue that the animalistic reading of “A Madman’s Diary” contrasts with the conventional cannibalistic reading and marks a revolutionary beginning to Lu Xun’s concern towards animality and humanity. Later echoing with the social Darwinism popular at the time, Lu Xun invests more nuanced affects in three different categories of animals through which he contemplates domestication, vulnerability, and self-definition. Finally, I argue that by inventing a discourse of animality and humanity, Lu Xun casts his pioneering gaze on Chinese morality, modern subjectivity, and the natural environment.]

Chan, Stephen. “The Language of Despair: Ideological Representations of the ‘New Woman’ by May Fourth Writers.” In Barlow, ed. Gender Politics in Modern China: Writing and Feminism. Durham: Duke UP, 1993, 13-32. [discussion of Lu Xun’s representation of Zijun in “Regret for the Past”]

Chang, Heng-hao. “A Pervasive and Profound ‘Vision of the Times’–A Comparison between Lai Ho’s Guijia [Going Home] and Lu Xun’s Guxiang [My Hometown]. Taiwan Literature: English Translation Series 21 (July 2007): 123-40.

Chang, Shuei-may. “Lu Hsun’s ‘Regret for the Past’ and the May Fourth Movement.” Tamkang Review 31,4-32, 1 (Summer-Autumn 2001): 173-203.

Cheng, Eileen J. “Gendered Spectacles: Lu Xun on Gazing at Women.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 16, 1 (Spring 2004): 1-36.

—–. “Recycling the Scholar-Beauty Narrative: Lu Xun on Love in the Age of Mechanical Reproductions.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 18, 2 (Fall 2006): 1-38.

—–. Literary Remains: Death, Trauma, and Lu Xun’s Refusal to Mourn. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2013. [MCLC Resource Center review by Yiju Huang]

Cheung, Chiu-yee. “The Love of a Decadent ‘Superman’: A Re-reading of Lu Xun’s ‘Regret for the Past.'” Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia 30 (1998): 26-46.

Chinnery, J. D. “The Influence of Western Literature on Lu Xun’s ‘Diary of a Madman.'” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies vol 23, part 2 (1960): 309-322.

Chou, Eva Shan. Memory, Violence, Queues: Lu Xun Interprets China. Ann Arbor: Association for Asian Studies, 2012.

—–. “‘A Story about Hair’: A Curious Mirror of Lu Xun’s Pre-Republican Years.” Journal of Asian Studies 66, 2 (May 1007): 421-59.

—–. “Confucian Elements in an Icon of Iconoclasm: ‘Dairy of a Madman.'” minima sinica 2 (2009): 62-78.

[Abstract: Confucius has been experiencing a comeback in China after nearly a century in the cold: his name and teachings have been invoked in many spheres, from official circles to the consumer vote of the bestsellers list, suggesting the receptivity of contemporary culture to a name that has been long denounced. This article looks back to the time of his initial expulsion in the early twentieth century and points to evidence suggesting that it was not easy at that time to make a wholesale rejection of Confucius or Confucianism. It shows that at the heart of an iconoclastic literary work that encapsulated this rejection, Lu Xun’s 1918 short story “Diary of a Madman,” can be found positive portrayals of Confucian values, specifically in familial relations. These portrayals suggest, among other things, how hard it is to get rid of all Confucian traits, no matter how much that is desired and thus perhaps provide an insight into their revival today.]

—–. “The End of Fiction, the Start of Politics: Lu Xun in 1926-1927.” Sino-Platonic Papers 266 (Jan. 2017).

Chinnery, John. “Lu Xun and Contemporary Chinese Literature.” China Quarterly 91 (1982): 411-23.

Chu, Madeline. “Lu Xun’s Women Characters.” Journal of Chinese Studies 1, 1 (Feb. 1984): 25-37.

Davies, Gloria. “The Problematic Modernity of Ah Q.” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 13 (1991): 57-76.

—–. Lu Xun’s Revolution: Writing in a Time of Violence. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013. [MCLC Resource Center review by Eileen J. Cheng]

Decker, Margeret. “Living in Sin: From May Fourth via the Antirightist Movement to the Present.” In Ellen Widmer and David Wang, eds., From May Fourth to June Fourth: Fiction and Film in Twentiety-Century China. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993, 221-46.

Dolezelova-Velingerova, Milena. “Lu Xun’s ‘Medicine.'” In Merle Goldman, ed. Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era. Cambridge: HUP, 1977. pp. 221-32.

Dong Rui. Lu Xun Gushi xinbian qianxi 鲁迅《故事新编》浅析 (A simple explication of Lu Xun’s Old Tales Retold). HK: Zhongliu, 1979.

Du, Daisy Yan. “The Failed Madman in ‘Dead Quiet and Emptiness:’ Death Drive and the Gendered Melancholic Subject in Lu Xun’s ‘Regret for the Past.'” East Asia Forum 13 (Autumn 2010): 88-106.

Eber, Irene. “Lu Xun’s Fiction.” Studia Orientalia Slovaca 13, 1 (2014).

Feng, Jin. “Books and Mirrors: Lu Xun and ‘the Girl Student.'” In Feng, The New Woman in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction. Lafayette, IN: Purdue UP, 2004, 40-59.

Feuerwerker, Yi-tsi Mei. “Text, Intertext, and the Representation of Self in Lu Xun, Yu Dafu, and Wang Meng.” In E. Widmer and D. Wang, eds., From May Fourth to June Fourth: Fiction and Film in Twentieth-Century China. Cambridge: HUP, 1993, 167-93.

Fitzgerald, Carolyn. “‘Diary of a Madwoman’ Traversing the Diaspora: Rewriting Lu Xun in Hualing Nieh’s Mulberry and Peach.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 26, 2 (Fall 2014): 38-88.

Foley, Todd. “Between Human and Animal: A Study of New Year’s Sacrifice, Kong Yiji, and Diary of a Madman.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 6, 3 (2012): 374-92

Foster, Paul. Lu Xun, Ah Q, “The True Story of Ah Q” and the National Character Discourse in Modern China. Ph.D. diss. Ohio State University, 1996.

—–. “Jin Yong’s Linghu Chong Faces off against Lu Xun’s Ah Q: Complements to the Construction of National Character.” Twentieth-Century China 30, 1 (Nov. 2004).

—–. Ah Q Archaeology: Lu Xun, Ah Q, Ah Q’s Progeny, and the National Character Discourse in Twentieth Century China. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005. [Lexington Books blurb]

Galik, Marian. “Lu Hsun’s Call to Arms: Creative Confrontation with Garshin, Andreev and Nietzsche.” In Galik, ed., Milestones in Sino-Western Literary Confrontation (1898-1979). Weisbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1986, 19-42.

—–. “Archer Hou Yi According to Julius Zeyer (1841-1901) and Lu Xun (1881-1936): Changing Perceptions of Ancient Myths in Modern Literature.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 8, 3 (Sept. 2014): 359-73.

[Abstract: This article analyzes two literary works by the Czech writer, Julius Zeyer (1841−1901), and Lu Xun (1881−1936) by elaborating upon two different myths concerning the Archer Hou Yi. These myths were presented by the missionary and Sinologist William Frederick Mayers in The Chinese Reader’s Manual: A Handbook of Biographical, Historical, Mythological and General Literary References (1874), and other Chinese sources. Zeyer highlighted the first myth, which was connected with the Emperor Yao and showed Hou Yi shooting arrows at the nine suns appearing together in the heavens, and Lu Xun preferred the second myth, where the Archer Yi rebelled against the Emperor Tai Kang, whom he drove from the Capital, and later was killed by Han Zhuo. The myth of Chang E who flew to the moon is described only by Lu Xun.]

Ge, Baoquan. “On the World Significance of ‘The True Story of Ah Q.'” Chinese Literature 7 (July 1981): 110-23.

Gu, Ming Dong. “Lu Xun’s Ah Quism: A Study of Its Intrinsic Nature and Transcultural Value.” International Communication of Chinese Culture 3, 2 (2016): 207-28.

[Abstract: Although Lu Xun’s literary achievements are many-sided, his greatest achievement is perhaps the creation of The True Story of Ah Q and the cultural concept Ah Quism. Since the publication of the fictional work, however, Ah Quism has remained a topic of controversy. This article attempts to explore what may have caused the widely different opinions, what significance the concept may have beyond the immediate context of Chinese society, and whether it has transcultural values over time. By re-examining Ah Q and Ah Quism from an interdisciplinary and transcultural perspective, this article argues that Ah Q is not merely a typical character under typical circumstances, but an artistic representation of an existential problem. In the final analysis, Ah Quism is a private religion, or an individual’s source of solace, capable of providing emotional consolation to and restoring mental equilibrium for anyone in distress and disappointment, irrespective of age, gender, race, nationality, and social status. This is where Lu Xun’s novella transcends the immediate context of Chinese culture and the local achievement of Chinese literature. The transcultural significance of Ah Quism endows Lu Xun’s novella with a lasting literary value in Chinese and world literature and guarantees its enduring appeal to readers of different times and traditions.]

Gushi xinbian xintan 故事新编新谈 (New discussions on Old Tales Retold). Jinan: Shandong wenyi, 1984.

Gushi xinbian yanjiu ziliao 故事新编研究资料 (Research materials on Old Tales Retold). Jinan: Shandong wenyi, 1984.

Halfmann, Roman. “De-Exotization’ as Approach to Re-creation: The Chinese Critical Reception of Diaries of a Madman.” Lili-Zeitschrift fur Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 39 (March 2009): 171-82.

Hanan, Patrick. “The Techniques of Lu Hsun’s Fiction.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 34 (1974): 53-96. Rpt. in Hanan, Chinese Fiction of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. NY: Columbia UP, 2004.

Harpham, John Samuel. 2013. “‘A Fierce Silence Falls’: Lu Xun’s Call to Arms.” Criticism 55, no. 1 (Winter): 95–118.

Heinrich, Ari Larissa. “Zoology, Celibacy, and the Heterosexual Imperative: Notes on Teaching Lu Xun’s ‘Loner’ as a Queer Text.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 7, 3 (2013): 441-458.

[Abstract: This essay reflects on the reception of Lu Xun’s short story “The Loner” (Gudu zhe, alternately translated as “The Lone Wolf,” “The Misanthrope,” and “The Isolate”) in American classrooms, where students have sometimes wondered whether that character might be read as “queer.” It suggests that the title character’s unusual and self-imposed celibacy is probably best explained by his belief, in a very general sense, in the foundational values of zoology as practiced in Japan and China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and thus that the story may be a better gateway to understanding the ways in which Lu Xun envisioned the mixed impact of new political economies on private life than a source text for queer studies. At the same time, however, this essay emphasizes that in “The Loner,” as elsewhere, accounting for the “heterosexual imperative” of early zoology (e.g., with its emphases on animal husbandry, propagation, reproduction) can have meaningful consequences for “queering” interpretations of received texts from literature, history of science, and beyond.

Hill, Michael Gibbs. “New Script and a New ‘Madman’s Diary.'” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 27, no.1 (Spring 2015): 79-108

Ho, Felicia Jiawen. Full Spectrum of Selves in Modern Chinese Literature: From Lu Xun to Xiao Hong. Ph.d. diss. Los Angeles: University of California Lo Angeles, 2012.

Hockx, Michel. “Mad Women and Mad Men: Intraliterary Contact in Early Republican Literature.” In Findeison and Gassmann, eds., Autumn Floods: Essays in Honour of Marian Galik. Bern: Peter Lang, 1997.

Huang, Alexander C. Y. “Tropes of Solitude and Lu Xun’s Tragic Characters.” Neohelicon 37, 2 (Dec. 2010): 349-57.

Huang, Martin Weizong. “The Inescapable Predicament: The Narrator and His Discourse in ‘The True Story of Ah Q.'” Modern China 16, 4 (Oct. 1990):430-49.

Huss, Ann. “The Madman That Was Ah Q: Tradition and Modernity in Lu Xun’s Fiction.” In Joshua Mostow, ed, and Kirk A. Denton, China section, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literatures. NY: Columbia UP, 2003, 385-94. Rpt in Kirk A. Denton, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia University Press, 2016, 136-44.

Huters, Theodore. “Blossoms in the Snow: Lu Xun and the Dilemma of Modern Chinese Literature.” Modern China 10, 1 (Jan. 1984): 49-77.

—–. “Lives in Profile: On the Authorial Voice in Modern and Contemporary Chinese Literature.” In Ellen Widmer and David Wang, eds., From May Fourth to June Fourth: Fiction and Film in Twentieth-Century China. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993, 269-94.

—–. “The Stories of Lu Xun.” In Barbara Stoler Miller, ed., Masterworks of Asian Literature in Comparative Perspective: A Guide for Teaching. Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 1994, 309-320.

—–. “Lu Xun and the Crisis of Figuration.” In Huters, Bringing the World Home: Appropriating the West in Late Qing and Early Republican China. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005, 252-74.

Idema, Wilt. “Free and Easy Wanderings: Lu Xun’s ‘Resurrecting the Dead’ and Its Precursors.” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (Dec. 2012).

Ilgo, Tina. “The Significance of Symbolic Elements in Lu Xun’s Short Stories.” Asian and African Studies XIV, 3 (2010): 19-28.

[Abstract: The present article interprets the symbolic elements in Lu Xun’s short stories which have been neglected in earlier studies about Lu Xun. I intend to show that the most obvious symbols in his fiction, like the iron room, the cannibalism, etc., have their counter balance in the animal symbols present in his work. Following this idea, I will focus on his less famous stories, such as A Comedy of Ducks and Some Rabbits and a Cat.]

—–. “The Moon as a Symbol and Central Motif in Lu Xun’s Short Stories.” In Jana S. Rošker and Nataša Vampelj Suhadolnik, eds., Modernisation of Chinese Culture: Continuity and Change. Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2013, 171-92.

Jin, Ha. “1918, April 2: Zhou Yucai Writes ‘A Madman’s Diary’ under the Pen Name Lu Xun.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literature History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 254-59.

Kaldis, Nicholas. “Aesthetic Cognition and the Subject of Discourse in Lu Xun’s Modern-Styel Fiction.” In Carlos Yu-Kai Lin and Victor H. Mair, eds., Remembering May Fourth: The Movement and Its Legacy. Leiden: Brill, 2020, 207-26.

Krebsova, Berta. “Lu Hsun and His Old Tales Retold.” Archiv Orientalni 28 (1960): 225-81, 640-56.

Kuoshu, Harry H. “Visualizing Ah Q: An Allegory’s Resistance to Representation.” In Harry Kuoshu, Lightness of Being in China: Adaptation and Discursive Figuration in Cinema and Theater. NY: Peter Lang, 1999, 17-49.

—–. “Visualizing Ah Q: An Allegory’s Resistance to Representation.” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 2, 2 (Jan. 1999): 1-36.

—–. “Dramatizing Xianglin Sao: Light Cast on an Opaque Figure.” In Harry Kuoshu, Lightness of Being in China: Adaptation and Discursive Figuration in Cinema and Theater. NY: Peter Lang, 1999, 51-70.

Lee, Haiyan. “Sympathy, Hypocrisy, and the Trauma of Chineseness.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 16, 2 (Fall 2004): 76-122.

Li Sangmu. Gushi xinbian de lunpian he yanjiu (Essays and research on Old Tales Retold). Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi, 1984.

Li, Wallace. “History and Fiction: A New Interpretation of ‘The True Story of Ah Q.'” Fu Jen Studies 17 (1984): 69-89.

[Abstract: Li analyzes the symbols that mark the interplay of history and fiction in “The True Story of Ah Q”]

Lian, Xinda. “Re-dreaming the Butterfly Dream.” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 3, 1 (July 1999): 103-29. [deals in part with “Diary of a Madman,” and the influence of Zhuangzi on it]

Lin Fei 林菲. Lun Gushi xinbian de sixiang, yishu, ji lishi yiyi 论《故事新编》的思想，艺术，及历史意义 (On the thought, art, and historical meaning of Old Tales Retold). Tianjin: Tianjin renmin, 1984.

Lin, Yu-sheng. The Crisis of Chinese Consciousness: Radical Anti-Traditionalism in the May Fourth Era. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979. [sections deal with “Zai jiulou shang,” “Ah Q,” etc.]

Liu, Lydia. “The Deixis of Writing in the First Person.” In Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity in China, 1900-1937. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995, 150-82. [deals, in part, with “Regret for the Past”]

—–. “Life as Form: How Biomimesis Encountered Buddhism in Lu Xun.” Journal of Asian Studies 68, 1 (Feb. 2009): 21-54.

Lu, Junhua. “Ah Q’s Spiritual Victory: The Philosophical and Psychological Implications.” Social Scienes in China 3 (1981): 21-60.

Lyell, William A. Lu Hsun’s Vision of Reality. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.

Ma, Xiaolu. “The Missing Link: Japan as an Intermediary in the Transculturation of the Diary of a Madman.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 8, 2 (June 2014): 331-46.

[Abstract: The Diary of A Madman (Kuangren riji), Lu Xun’s first well-known short story and the alleged first modern short story in vernacular Chinese, is famous for its first-person narrative by an intellectual that is suffering from a persecution complex. As acknowledged by Lu Xun himself and argued by most scholars, this short story was influenced by Gogol’s homonymic short story, but has developed more profound melancholy and indignation. However, as my paper demonstrates, this perspective neglects the role of Japan as an intermediary in the transculturation of madness. First, Lu Xun’s initial encounter with Gogol’s Diary of A Madman was through his reading of Futabatei Shimei’s translation in the Japanese magazine Kyōmi. Second, the framed narrative and contrasting styles of Lu Xun’s short story, which are not features of Gogol’s, might also be due to the inspiration from the Japanese genbun itchi movement in the Meiji period. Third, and most importantly, cannibalism, a major theme in Lu Xun’s Diary of A Madman, was arguably shaped by the heated discussion in Japan on national character and cannibalism. My paper will trace the double origin of the depiction of madness and cannibalism in Lu Xun’s work and illustrate the importance of the role of Japan in the transculturation of the story of a madman.]

Masi, Edoarda. “Ah Q (Lu Hsun, 1921-1922).” In Franco Moretti, ed., The Novel: Volume 2: Forms and Themes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006, 469-75.

Meng Guanglai and Han Rixin, eds. Gushi xinbian de yanjiu ziliao (Research materials on Old Tales Retold). Jinan: Shandong wenyi, 1984.

Prusek, Jaroslav. “‘Huai Chiu’: A Precursor of Modern Chinese Literature.” In The Lyrical and the Epic: Studies in Modern Chinese Literature. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1980, 102-9.

Qiu, Sha. “On the Death of Sister Xianglin.” Modern Chinese Literature 3, 1-2 (Spring 1987): 107-12.

Rojas, Carlos. “Cannibalism and the Chinese Body Politic: Hermeneutics and Violence in Cross-Cultural Perception.” PMC 13, 3 (May 2002).

—–. “Of Canons and Cannibalism: A Psycho-Immunological Reading of “Diary of a Madman.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 23, 1 (Spring 2011): 47-76.

Rydholm, Lena. “Reformist Discourses: Classical Literary Language Versus Modern Written Vernacular in Lu Xun’s Short Story ‘A Madman’s Diary.'” In Stefan Helgesson, Annika Mörte Alling, Yvonne Lindqvist, and Helena Wulff, eds., World Literatures: Exploring the Cosmopolitan-Vernacular Exchange. Stockholm: Stockholm University Press, 2018, 70-88.

Shih, Shu-mei. “Evolutionism and Experimentalism: Lu Xun and Tao Jingsun.” In Shi, The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917-1937. Berkeley: UC Press, 2001, 73-95.

Snow, Edgar. “Lu Shun – Master of Pai-hua.” Asia 35, 1 (1935): 40–43.

Stuckey, Andrew. “Female Relations: Voiceless Women in ‘Liuyi jie’ and ‘Zhufu.’ Frontiers of Literary Study in China 11, 3 (2017): 88 – 509.

[Abstract: Although the notion of the new woman in modern China has received much scholarly consideration, her usually illiterate rural sister has not received nearly as much critical attention. With the exception of Lu Xun’s iconic Xianglin sao—from his 1924 story “Zhufu” (The New Year’s Sacrifice)—almost no depictions of traditional women have been critically appraised in current scholarship. This seems unfortunate when such women can be considered to be both the opposite of and the raw material from which the new woman would spring. This article seeks to begin to address this question by juxtaposing Xianglin sao with another more unfamiliar May Fourth depiction of a rural woman: Liuyi jie (from Bing Xin’s story of the same name). By situating Liuyi jie and Xianglin sao firmly within the family structure, the resulting comparison of both stories reveals the structural obstacles that inhibited traditional women from becoming fully active subjects in the new China. The comparison also shows how the May Fourth project established a new woman, one capable of ushering in a newly modern China, whose very existence relies on the discursive silencing of old-style women unable to make this modern transition.]

Sun Lung-kee. “To Be or Not to Be ‘Eaten’: Lu Xun’s Dilemma of Political Engagement.” Modern China 14.4 (1986): 459-485.

Tambling, Jeremy. Madmen and Other Survivors: Reading Lu Xun’s Fiction. Hong Kong: Hong Kong UP, 2007.

[Abstract: puts the short stories written by this outstanding Chinese writer between 1918 and 1926 into a broad context of Modernism. The fiction of Lu Xun (1881–1936) deals with the China moving beyond the 1911 Revolution. He asks about the possibilities of survival, and what that means, even considering the possibility that madness might be a strategy by which that is possible. Such an idea calls identity into question, and Lu Xun is read here as a writer for whom that is a wholly problematic concept. The book makes use of critical and cultural theory to consider these short stories in the context of not only Chinese fiction, but in terms of the art of the short story, and in relation to literary modernism. It attempts to put Lu Xun into as wide a perspective as possible for contemporary reading. To make his work widely accessible, he is treated here in English translation.]

Tang, Tao. “Two Portrayals of Chinese Women in Lu Hsun’s Stories.” Chinese Literature 9 (1973): 83-90. Rpt. in Lu Hsun: Writing for the Revolution. San Francisco: Red Sun, 1976, 109-16.

Tang, Xiaobing. “Lu Xun’s ‘Diary of a Madman’ and a Chinese Modernism.” PMLA 107, 5 (1992): 1222-34.

—–. “‘Diary of a Madman’ and a Chinese Modernism.” In Chinese Modernism: The Heroic and the Quotidian. Durham: Duke UP, 2000, 49-73.

—–. “Beyond Homesickness: An Intimate Reading of Lu Xun’s ‘My Native Land.'” In Chinese Modernism: The Heroic and the Quotidian. Durham: Duke UP, 2000, 49-96.

Trappl, Richard. “Die Ironie des Zeitlichen: Rezeptionspragmatische Uberlegungen zu Alte Geschicten neu erzaht” (The irony of time: reception-pragmatic reflection on Old Stories Retold). In Wolfgang Kubin, ed., Aus dem Garten der Wildnis: Studien zu Lu Xun (1881-1936). Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1989, 165-76.

Tsu, Jing. “The Search for Defect: Ah Q.” In Tsu, Failure, Nationalism, and Literature: The Making of Modern Chinese Identity, 1895-1937. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005, 119-127.

Veg, Sebastian. Fictions du pouvoir chinois: Littérature, modernisme et démocratie au début du XXe siècle. Paris: Editions EHESS, 2009.

—–. “Democratic Modernism: Rethinking the Politics of Early Twentieth-Century Fiction in China and Europe.” boundary 2 38, 3 (2011): 27-65.

Wang, Alfred S. “Lu Hsun and Maxine Hong Kingston: Medicine as a Symbol in Chinese and Chinese American Literature.” Literature and Medicine 8 (1989): 1-21.

[Abstract: Wang outlines the function of medicine as a metaphor for the negotiation between East and West in “Diary of a Madman” and “Medicine,” as well as in Maxine Hong Kingston’s novels The Woman Warrior and China Men]

Wang, Ban. “Irony and Social Criticism in Lu Xun’s Fiction.” In Wang, Narrative Perspective and Irony in Selected Chinese and American Fiction. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2002.

—–. “Rhetoric of the Absurd: the Grotesque in Yu Hua and Lu Xun.” In Wang, Narrative Perspective and Irony in Selected Chinese and American Fiction. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2002.

—–. “Old Dreams Retold: Lu Xun as Mytho-Ecological Writer.” Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature 17, 2 (Oct. 2020).

Wang, Baorong. Lu Xun’s Fiction in English Translation: The Early Years. Ph.D. diss. Hong Kong: The University of Hong Kong, 2011.

—–. “George Kin Leung’s English Translation of Lu Xun’s A Q Zhengzhuan.” Archive Orientalni 85, 2 (2017): 253-81.

Wang, Hui. “Intuition, Repetition, and Revolution: Six Moments in The Life of Ah Q.” In Carlos Rojas and Andrea Bachner, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Literatures. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, 702-21.

Wang, Qin. “How Not to Have Nostalgia for the Future: A Reading of Lu Xun’s ‘Hometown.'” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 10, 3 (2016): 461-73.

[Abstract: This essay rereads Lu Xun’s 1921 story, “Hometown,” by focusing on its nostalgic character. Against the background of a modernizing historical moment in China, the story is about a city-dweller intellectual coming back to his homeland, only to find that nothing there corresponds to his somewhat nostalgic and romantic expectations. For a long period, students of modern Chinese literature have read this story either as a critique of the feudal Chinese culture whose vestige still loomed large in rural areas at the time, or as a literary representation of Lu Xun’s hesitation toward the belief in progress embraced by those who passionately participated the cultural movement. Through a rereading of this text I argue that, instead of shedding a critical light on the economically and culturally backward rural China, here represented by the “homeland” of the protagonist, or showing his hesitation toward the New Cultural Movement, Lu Xun’s narrative of “returning home” indicates how the political radicality of the movement points toward a hope beyond program and calculation.]

Wang, Xuefu. “Xia Yu and Jesus.” Chinese Theological Review (1989).

Wang, Yuping. “Alternative New China Cinema: Hong Kong Leftist Cinema during the Cold War — A Discussion of the Hong Kong Leftist Film The True Story of Ah Q.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 9, 1 (2015): 131-45.

Weakland, John. “Lusin’s ‘Ah Q’: A Rejected Image of Chinese Character.” Pacific Spectator 10 (1956): 137-46.

Wong, Kam-ming. “The Madman and the Everyman Self and Other in Lu Xun.” Proceedings of the Twelfth International Symposium on Asian Studies. HK: Asian Research Service, 1990, 293-310.

Wong, Yoon-wah. “The Influence of Western Literature on China’s First Modern Story.” Nanyang University Journal 8/9 (1974-75): 144-56. Rpt. In Wong, Essays on Chinese Literature. Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1988, 52-66.

—–. “A Journey to the Heart of Darkness: The Mode of Travel Literature in Lu Xun’s Fiction.” Tamkang Review 23, 1-4 (Aut. 1992-Summer 1993): 671-92.

—–. “Lu Xun’s Medical Studies in Japan and His Fiction: A Deconstructive Reading.” In Dennis Haskell and Ron Shapiro, eds., Interactions: Essays in the Literature and Culture of the Asia-Pacific Region. Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 2000, 152-63.

Wu, Yenna. “Pitfalls of the Postcolonialist Rubric in the Study of Modern Chinese Fiction Featuring Cannibalism: From Lu Xun’s ‘Diary of a Madman’ to Mo Yan’s Boozeland.” Tamkang Review 30, 3 (Spring 2000): 51-88.

Xu, Jian. “The Will to the Transaethetic: The Truth Content of Lu Xun’s Fiction.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 11, 1 (Spring 1999): 61-92.

—–. “Retrieving the Working Body in Modern Chinese Fiction: The Question of the Ethical in Representation.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 16, 1 (Spring 2004): 115-52. [deals with stories by Lu Xun, Mao Dun, Lao She, and Xiao Hong]

Xu Qinwen 许钦文. Nahan fenxi 呐喊分析 (Analysis of Outcry). HK: Wencai reprint, 1970.

—–. Panghuang fenxi 彷徨分析 (Analysis of Wandering). HK: Wencai reprint, 1970.

Yang, Shuhui. “The Fear of Moral Failure: An Intertextual Reading of Lu Hsun’s Fiction.” Tamkang Review 21, 3 (1991): 239-54.

[Abstract: Yang suggests that the stories in Lu Xun’s second collection display the impotence of Chinese intellectuals in order to parody the more optimistic stories in his first collection]

Yeung, Wayne C. F. “Curing the Nation? Towards A Comparative Study of Medicine and Politics in Lu Xun and L.-F. Céline.” Trespassing Journal 4 (2014): 79-95.

Yin, Xiaoling. “Lu Xun’s Parallel to Walter Benjamin: The Consciousness of the Tragic in ‘The Loner.'” Tamkang Review 26, 3 (Spring 1996): 53-68.

[Abstract: Yin applies Walter Benjamin’s theory of the silence of the tragic hero to “The Loner,” explaining how this theory runs counter to traditional notions of literary tragedy]

—–. “The Paralyzed and the Dead: A Comparative Reading of ‘The Dead’ and ‘In a Tavern.'” Comparative Literature Studies 29, 3 (1992): 276-95.

[Abstract: Yin investigates themes of spiritual paralysis, death, and mortality in “In the Tavern” and in James Joyce’s “The Dead,” concluding that Lu Xun’s story shows the failure to provide action in the face of social ills]

Yue, Gang. “Lu Xun and Cannibalism.” In The Mouth That Begs: Hunger, Cannibalism, and the Politics of Eating in Modern China. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999, 67-100.

Zhang, Xudong. “The Will to Allegory and the Origin of Chinese Modernism: Rereading Lu Xun’s ‘Ah Q—The Real Story’.” In Mark Wollaeger and Matt Eatough, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

[Abstract: Ah Q—The Real Story is the most elaborate fictional work by Lu Xun, published in the heyday of the Chinese Vernacular Revolution. This article argues that reading it in modernist terms challenges both the mainstream reading of this text and the conventional assumptions of modernism as an aesthetic and theoretical framework. It aims to show that the significance of this work lies in the formal and formal-political playfulness, even autonomy, in which the social implications of Chinese modernism reside. The article contends that the modernist design of Ah Q lies in its unique formal and narrative engineering of an allegorical subversion and reconstruction of the basic categories of Confucian cultural-imperial order, such as name, words or speech, action, and biography/history.]

Zhou, Chenshou. “Literature by Other Mediums: Revisiting Lu Xun’s ‘Preface to Outcry‘.” positions: asia critique 29, 2 (May 2021): 373-98.

Zhu, Ping. “Traversing the Sublime: A Zizekian Reading of Lu Xun’s ‘Regrets for the Past.'” International Journal of Zizek Studies 3, 1 (2009).

—–. “Traversing the Sublime: The Metamorphosis of the Female Body in Lu Xun’s ‘Regrets for the Past.'” New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 12, 1 (2010): 14-28.

Poetry

Admussen, Nick. “A Music for Baihua: Lu Xun’s Wild Grass and ‘A Good Story.'” CLEAR 31 (Dec. 2009): 1-22.

—-. “Foreword: The Title of Yecao.” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 11, 2 (Spring 2014): 8-12.

—–. “The Poetics of Hinting in Wild Grass.” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 11, 2 (Spring 2014): 80-109.

Akiyoshi, Shu. “Zhou Zuoren’s Influence on Lu Xun’s ‘The Shadow’s Leave-Taking.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 7, 4 (2013): 551-72.

Alber, Charles. “Wild Grass, Symmetry and Parallelism in Lu Hsun’s Prose Poems.” In William Nienhauser, ed. Critical Essays on Chinese Literature. HK: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 1976, 1-20.

Bieg, Lutz. “Unkraut oder vom ‘verzweifelten Widerstandskampt’ gegen das Nichts: Vorlaufige Bemerkungen zu Lu Xuns Prosadichtung Yecao.” Weeds or a desperate opposition of void: preliminary notes on Lu Xun’s prose poetry Yecao). In Wolfgang Kubin, ed., Aus dem Garten der Wildnis: Studien zu Lu Xun (1881-1936). Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1989, 149-64.

Brown, Carolyn. “Lu Xun’s Interpretation of Dreams.” In Carolyn Brown, ed. Psycho-Sinology: The Universe of Dreams in Chinese Culture. Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 1988, 67-79.

Chan, Roy. “Dream as Representation: Wild Grass and Realism’s Responsibility.” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 11, 2 (Spring 2014).

—–. “Dream as Representation: Lu Xun’s Wild Grass and the Promises of Literary Realism.” In Chan, The Edge of Knowing: Dreams, History, and Realism in Modern Chinese Literature. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017, 39-73.

Davies, Gloria. Lu Xun’s Revolution: Writing in a Time of Violence. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013. [MCLC Resource Center review by Eileen J. Cheng]

Feng Xuefeng 冯雪峰. Lun Yecao 论野草 (On Wild Grass). Shanghai: Xin wenyi, 1956.

Hsia, T.A. “Aspects of the Power of Darkness in Lu Hsun.” The Gate of Darkness: Studies on the Leftist Literary Movement. Seattle: UWP, 1968. pp. 146-62.

Huang, Alexander C. Y. “Tropes of Solitude and Lu Xun’s Tragic Characters.” Neohelicon 37, 2 (Dec. 2010): 349-57.

Kaldis, Nicholas. The Prose Poem and Aesthetic Insight: Lu Xun’s Yecao. Ph. diss. Columbus: The Ohio State University, 1998.

—–. “The Prose Poem as Aesthetic Cognition: Lu Xun’s Yecao.” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 3, 2 (Jan. 2000): 43-82.

—–. The Chinese Prose Poem: A Study of Lu Xun’s Wild Grass (Yecao). Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2014. [MCLC Resource Center review by John Crespi]

[Abstract: This study remedies the absence of a comprehensive English-language study of Lu Xun’s Yecao and is the perfect companion to the reading and study of Yecao. It is not only a useful reference work and bibliographical source but also an informative contribution to and dialogue with the extant scholarship. Most importantly, this study engages with the Yecao prose poems in a rigorous scholarly fashion while simultaneously allowing each prose poem to influence its reader and determine directions and conclusions made during the interaction of interpretation. This book deftly addresses in detail key aspects of context and content integral to interpreting Yecao. As the first English-language companion to Yecao (providing bibliographical resources, historical context, background on the prose poem genre, an elaboration of Lu Xun’s mature aesthetic praxis and philosophical outlook), the book’s interpretations of Lu Xun’s prose poems will further aspire to bring Yecao and a psychoanalytically informed practice of close reading closer to the fore of Lu Xun studies specifically and Chinese literary studies in general.]

von Kowallis, Jon Eugene. “Lu Xun’s Classical Poetry.” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 13 (1991): 101-18.

—–. The Lyrical Lu Xun: A Study of His Classical Style Verse. Honolulu: U. of Hawaii Press, 1996.

—–. “Lu Xun’s Classical-style Poetry and the 1911 Revolution.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 6, 3 (2012): 112-130.

—–. “Understanding Wild Grass by Talking to Oneself: Lu Xun’s Yecao through the Lens of Ziyan Ziyu and the Prism of the Past.” Frontiers of Literary Study in China 13, 2 (2019): 171-99.

[Abstract: This article makes a reinterpretation of Lu Xun’s acclaimed prose poetry collection Yecao (Wild grass), written between 1924−27, by reading it in conjunction with a rediscovered prototype consisting of seven pieces published in Guomin gongbao (The citizen’s gazette) between August and September 1919 under the title Ziyan ziyu (Talking to oneself). Lu Xun’s baihua prose style had advanced considerably in the interim, but the author discerns a degree of thematic overlap between the two collections, on the basis of which he proposes answers to key questions that have been asked about Yecao since its first publication, concluding that it is still as fresh and avant-garde a collection to readers today as it was nearly one hundred years ago.]

Laughlin, Charles. “Intractable Paradox: Revisionism in the Reception of Wild Grass.” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 11, 2 (Spring 2014).

Lee, Mabel. “Solace for the Corpse with its Heart Gouged Out: Lu Xun’s Use of the Poetic Form.” Papers on Far Eastern History 26 (1982): 145-74.

—–. “May Fourth: Symbol of the Spirit of Bring-It-Here-ism for Chinese Intellectuals.” Papers on Far Eastern History 41 (March 1990): 77-96.

—–. “Lu Xun’s Wild Grass: Autobiographical Moments of the Creative Self.” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 11, 2 (Spring 2014).

Li Helin 李何林. Lu Xun Yecao zhujie 鲁迅野草注解 (Interpretations of Lu Xun’s Wild Grass). Xian: Shanxi renmin, 1975.

Min Kangsheng 闵杭生. Diyu bianyan di xiaohua: Lu Xun sanwenshi chutan 地域边沿的小花: 鲁迅散文诗初探 (Small flowers on the edge of hell: a preliminary investigation of Lu Xun’s prose poems). Xian: Shanxi renmin, 1981.

Ng, Mau-sang. “Symbols of Anxiety in Wild Grass.” Renditions 26 (1986): 155-64.

Qian Liquan 钱理群. Xinling de tansuo 心灵的探索 (In search of the soul). Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi.

Ren Chuanyin 任传印. “Lun Lu Xun Yecao de zhongji guanhuai yu fojiao wenhua” 論魯迅野草的終極關懷與佛教文化 (On the ultimate concern in Lu Xun’s Wild Grass and its relationship with Buddhist culture), Journal of Central South University (Social Science) 中南大学学报/社会科学版 22, 1 (2016): 183–89.

Sun Yushi 孙玉石. Yecao yanjiu 野草研究 (Study of Wild Grass). Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue, 1982.

Xia, Xiaoyu. “Exclamation Points and Elliptical Hope: Reading Wild Grass against Modern Chinese Punctuation Reform.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 32, 1 (Spring 2020): 194-232.

Zhang Longxi, “Revolutionary as Christ: The Unrecognized Savior in Lu Xun’s Works.” Christianity and Literature 45:1 (Autumn 1995): 81-93.

Essay/Prose

Cheng, Eileen J. and Kirk A. Denton. “Editor’s Introduction: Lu Xun, the In-Between Critic.” In Lu Xun, Jottings under Lamplight. Eds. Eileen J. Cheng and Kirk A. Denton. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017, 1-13.

Chou, Eva Shan. “The Political Martyr in Lu Xun’s Writings.” Asia Major 12, 2 (1999): 139-62. [with a focus on Lu Xun’s essay “In Memory of Liu Hezhen”]

Chung, Wen. “On Lu Hsun’s Essay ‘Forgetting Meat and Forgetting Water.'” In Lu Hsun: Writing for the Revolution. San Francisco: Red Sun, 1976, 130-33.

—–. “On Lu Hsun’s Long Lost Essay.” In Lu Hsun: Writing for the Revolution. San Francisco: Red Sun, 1976, 154-57. [about “The Other Side of Celebrating the Recovery of Shanghai and Nanking”]

Davies, Gloria. Lu Xun’s Revolution: Writing in a Time of Violence. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013. [MCLC Resource Center review by Eileen J. Cheng]

[von] Kowallis, Jon [Eugene]. “Lu Xun’s Wenyan Essay Moluo shi li shuo (On the Power of Mara Poetry) and the Concerns of the May Fourth.” In Marian Galik, ed., Interliterary and Intraliterary Aspects of the May Fourth Movement 1919 in China. Bratislava: Veda, 1990, 45-58.

—–. “Re-reading Lu Xun`s Early Wenyan Essays in the Shadow of the Beijing Olympics.” In Bei Ling, ed., Literature as Witness. Taipei: Free Culture Press, 2009, 42-49.

—–. “Lu Xun’s ‘Toward a Refutation of Malevolent Voices.’” boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture 38, 2 (Summer 2011): 39-62.

—–. “Lu Xun’s Early Essays and Present-Day China.” Studia Orientalia Slovaca 12, 1 (2013).

—–. “Translating Lu Xun’s Mara: Determining the ‘Source’ Text, the ‘Spirit’ versus ‘Letter’ Dilemma and Other Philosophical Conundrums.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 7, 3 (2013): 422-40.

[Abstract: Not long after he withdrew from medical studies at Sendai and returned to Tokyo in 1906, Lu Xun began research on the history and philosophy of science, modern European thought, and comparative literature which produced five treatises he eventually published in an archaistic classical prose style influenced by that of Zhang Taiyan. Central to, and the longest among these essays is Moluo shi li shuo (On the power of Māra Poetry), which focuses on literature East and West and, in particular, the Byronic poets and their international legacy. In translating, annotating, and analyzing this essay, one meets with a number of quotations and terms derived originally from Western sources, sometimes through a secondary Japanese, German, or English translation. This article will focus on issues that arise in the translation and interpretation of that essay, in particular on the question of determining the source text, what bearing that has or should have on scholarly translation and how the study of textual issues can shed light not only on texts but also on literary and intellectual history. It offers an analysis of Lu Xun’s own interpretation of the source texts as well as conclusions reflecting on the significance of his literary career and broader mission.]

—–. “On the Critical Reception of Lu Xun’s Early Classical-Style Essays of the Japan Period.” Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture 3, 2 (Nov. 2016): 357-99.

[Abstract: Lu Xun’s 魯迅 (1881–1936) early classical-style essays are concerned with issues in the history and philosophy of science, as well as literature, philosophy, politics, and aesthetics during an era in which China went through profound cultural changes. Part of their significance also lies in the way they provide us with an unabashed glimpse at what Lu Xun, who was to become China’s most important writer of the twentieth century, set out to accomplish with his intended literary career. They first appeared in the Chinese expatriate journal Henan 河南 (Ho-nan, 1907–8). Although they are products of his last student years in Japan, the fact that he chose to include the two longest of them at the very front of his 1926 anthology Fen 墳 (The Grave) indicates that he considered the views expressed therein neither too immature nor too dated to reprint at the height of his career as a creative writer. In fact, he suggests in his preface to Fen that one of his reasons for doing so was that the poets and causes treated there had, ironically, taken on an increased relevance for China in the years “after the founding of the republic.” Over the years since they were written, the content and style of these essays have been the subject of considerable scholarly scrutiny, but this has drawn out divergent views. Scholars in Japan have done an admirable job of tracing down the sources of some of the essays, although their interpretation was not without controversy there. Chinese scholars have first discounted, then eschewed, then annotated, and finally extolled them as harbingers of a new poetics or a profound meditation on unresolved issues still facing China. Westerners, by and large, give them a degree of primacy, but from different perspectives and to different degrees. This article examines the reception of these essays internationally, recontextualizing it within the historical factors that contributed to and molded it.]

—–. “Re-contextualizing Lu Xun’s Early Thought and Poetics in the Journal Henan.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 12, 3 (2018): 388-423.

Jiang, Hongsheng. “The Ancient Wellspring and the Source of the Future: The Creation of New Poetry and the New Man in Lu Xun’s On the Power of Mara Poetry.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 6, 3 (2012): 337-53.

Lee, Leo Ou-fan . “Literature on the Eve of Revolution: Reflections on Lu Xun’s Leftist Years, 1927-1936.” Modern China 2, 3 (1976): 277-326.

Li, Hsi-fan. “Writing for the Revolution–An Appraisal of Lu Hsun’s Essays.” In Lu Hsun: Writing for the Revolution. San Francisco: Red Sun, 1976, 43-56.

Murthry, Viren. “Reading Lu Xun’s Early Essays in Relation to Marxism.” In Carlos Rojas and Andrea Bachner, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Literatures. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, 682-701.

Ng, Janet. “Names and Destiny: Hu Shi’s and Lu Xun’s Self-Nomination through Autobiography.” In Ng, The Experience of Modernity: Chinese Autobiography in the Early Twentieth Century. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003, 91-118.

Palermo, A. “Lu Xun against the ‘Enemies of Poetry.'” In Marian Galik, ed., Interliterary and Intraliterary Aspects of the May Fourth Movement 1919 in China. Bratislava: Veda, 1990, 67-82.

Pollard, David. “Lu Xun’s Zawen.” In Leo Ou-fan Lee, ed., Lu Xun and His Legacy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985, 54-89.

Scoggin, Mary. Ethnography of a Chinese Essay: Zawen in Contemporary China. Ph.D. diss. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1997.

Sun, Emily. “Literary Modernity and the Emancipation of Voice: Defences of Poetry by Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lu Xun.” In Sun, On the Horizon of World Literature: Forms of Modernity in Romantic England and Republican China. NY: Fordham University Press, 2021, 23-49.

Wang, David Der-wei. “1908, February; 1908, November: From Mara to Nobel.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 219-25.

Wang, Pu. “Poetics, Politics, and Ursprung/yuan: On Lu Xun’s Conception of ‘Mara Poetry.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 23, 2 (Fall 2011): 34-63.

Wang, Qin. “Lu Xun’s ‘Ah Jin’ and the Politics of Exemplarity.” In Wang, Configurations of the Individual in Modern Chinese Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, 227-90.

Yan, Jiayan. “A Pioneer in Raising Issues against the Mainstream: Lu Xun’s ‘Difference between Literature and Politics.'” Studia Orientalia Slovaca 10, 2 (2010): 283-90.

Yan Qingsheng 阎庆生. Lu Xun zawen de yishi tezhi 鲁迅杂文的艺术特质 (The special artistic qualities of Lu Xun’s essays). Xi’an: Shanxi renmin, 1983.

Yuan, Liang-chun. “On Lu Hsun’s Essay ‘Propriety.'” In Lu Hsun: Writing for the Revolution. San Francisco: Red Sun Press, 1976, 124-29.

Zhang, Xudong. “The Becoming Self-Conscious of Zawen: Literary Modernity and Politics of Language in Lu Xun’s Essay Production during His Transitional Period.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 8, 3 (Sept. 2014): 374-409.

[Abstract: While Lu Xun’s early works of fiction have long established his literary reputation, this article focuses on the form and content of his zawen essays written several years later, from 1925 to 1927. Examining the zawen from Huagai ji, Huagai ji xubian (sequel), and Eryi ji (Nothing more), the author views these as “transitional” essays which demonstrate an emergent self-consciousness in Lu Xun’s writing. Through close reading of a selection of these essays, the author considers the ways in which they point toward a state of crisis for Lu Xun, as well as a means of tackling his sense of passivity and “petty matters.” This crisis-state ultimately yields a new literary form unique to the era, a form which represents a crucial source of Chinese modernity. From sheer impossibility and a “negating spirit” emerges a new and life-affirming possibility of literary experience.]

—–. “Agonistic Memory, Compound Temporality and Expansion of Literary Space in Lu Xun.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 13, 2 (2019): 200-61.

[Abstract: The paper examines the ways in which memory is constructed in Lu Xun’s writings, above all his essay (zawen) by means of an artistic staging of its antagonism with forgetting. The author emphasizes the primacy of forgetting, as opposed to recollection conventionally understood, as the centrality of Lu Xun’s stressful, tragic principle of memory. The author argues that, by turning to forgetting as a register of and formal-spatial space for historical and political content, Lu Xun puts his signature stylistic maneuvers and mannerisms in full display. Hence, “memory for the sake of forgetting” must be understood literally, that is, as forgetting functioning as a heightened and intensified form of social protest, albeit in modernistic rather than realistic terms; and through this pressurized and agonistic inner space of convoluted temporality. Furthermore, the author seeks to show that forgetting also serves a representational function that goes hand-in-hand with Lu Xun’s zawen as poetics and chronicle all at once. In Lu Xun’s writing of reminiscence, that which fails to be repressed into silence, despair and oblivion roars back from the depth of an existential void, and reorganizes historical experiences of chaos and danger into a more powerful and intimate encasement and mimesis of reality. Thus, in Lu Xun, a modernist intervention into nothingness makes palpable history’s own structure of conflict, oppression and impasse which simultaneously stands for a metaphysics of defiance and hope.]

Literary Criticism

Galik, Marian. “Lu Hsun’s Contribution to the History of Modern Chinese Literary Criticism and His Struggle for a United Marxist Front.” In Galik, The Genesis of Modern Chinese Literary Criticism, 1917-1930. London: Curzon Press, 1980, 236-84.

Lin, Carlos Yu-Kai. “The Rise of Xiaoshuo as Literary Concept: Lu Xun and the Question of ‘Fiction’ in Chinese Literature.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 8, 4 (2014): 631-51.

[Abstract: Originally derived from historical and philosophical writings, xiaoshuo is the modern Chinese term for fictional work of any length. However, how this term came to be used to translate the Western concepts of “fiction” and “novel” is a question that remains to be fully explored. This paper focuses on Lu Xun’s seminal work Zhongguo xiaoshuo shilüe (A brief history of Chinese fiction; 1925) so as to investigate the ways in which the Western concept of fiction is built into Lu Xun’s historicization of xiaoshuo. I argue that Lu Xun’s articulation of xiaoshuo is distinguished by his emphasis on both the term’s universality and its “Chinese-ness.”]

Liu Zaifu 刘再复. Lu Xun meixue sixiang lungao 鲁迅美学思想论稿 (Draft study of Lu Xun’s aesthetic thought). Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue, 1981.

von Kowallis, Jon Eugene. “Translating Lu Xun’s Mara: Determining the ‘Source’ Text, the ‘Spirit’ versus ‘Letter’ Dilemma and Other Philosophical Conundrums.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 7, 3 (2013): 422-40.

Wang, Ban. The Sublime Figure of History. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997. [contains discussion of Lu Xun’s late Qing views of literature]

Translation

Chan, Leo Tak-hung. “What’s Modern in Chinese Translation Theory? Lu Xun and the Debates on Literalism and Foreignization in the May Fourth Period.” TTR: Traduction, Terminologie et Redaction 14, 2 (2001).

Cui, Wenjin. “‘Literal Translation’ and the Materiality of Language: Lu Xun as a Case.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 6, 3 (2012): 393-409.

Farquhar, Mary Ann. “Lu Xun and the World of Children.” In Farquhar, Children’s Literature in China from Lu Xun to Mao Zedong. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1999, 26-90. [contains discussion of Lu Xun’s late Qing and May Fourth involvement in translation of children’s literature]

Findeisen, Raoul David. “A Tranlator’s Testament: Lu Xun’s Si hunling (Dead Souls, 1935-36).” In Findeisen et al., eds, At Home in Many Worlds: Reading, Writing, and Translating from Chinese and Jewish Cultures: Essays in Honour of Iren Eber. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2009, 189-202.

Gu Jun 顧鈞. Lu Xun fanyi yanjiu 魯迅翻譯研究 (A study of Lu Xun the translator). Fuzhou: Fujian jiaoyu, 2009.

von Kowallis, Jon Eugene. ‘Translation and Originality: Reexamining Lu Xun as a Translator.” Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia 40 (2008): 320-333.

Lundberg, Lennart. Lu Xun as a Translator: Lu Xun’s Translation and Introduction of Literature and Literary Theory, 1903-1936. Stockholm: Orientaliska Studier, Stockholm University, 1989.

Ma, Xiaolu. “Minor Literature as a Vital Component of World Literature: Lu Xun’s Translation of Bulgarian Literature via German.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 35, 1 (Summer 2023):

Qian, Yan. “Lu Xun and Purposeful Translation.” In Mabel Lee, Chiu-yee Cheung, and Sue Wiles, eds., Lu Xun and Australia. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly, 2016, 157-64.

Uhl, Christian. “Translation and Time: A Memento of the Curvature of the Poststructuralist Plane.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 6, 3 (2012): 426-68.

Veg, Sebastian. “Lu Xun and ‘Hard Translations’: the Specificities of Republican Literature.” In Nicoletta Pesaro, ed., The Ways of Translation: Constraints and Liberties of Translating Chinese. Venezia: Libreria Editrice Cafoscarina, 2013, 45-59.

von Kowallis, Jon Eugene. “Lu Xun and Gogol.” The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review 28, nos. 1-2 (2000): 101-12.

—–. “Translation and Originality: Reexamining Lu Xun as a Translator.” Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia 40 (2008): 320-333.

—–. “Translation and Originality: Reexamining Lu Xun as a Translator.” The Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia 39/40 (2008): 320-33.

Wang, Pu. “The Promethean Translator and Cannibalistic Pains: Lu Xun’s ‘Hard Translation’ as a Political Allegory.” Translation Studies 6, 3 (2013): 324-38.

[Abstract: This essay revisits a crucial moment in the modern Chinese history of translation: Lu Xun’s “hard translation” of Marxist theories in the late 1920s and the ensuing debate on translation in the early 1930s. It questions the simplistic application of the paradigm of literalism to the case of “hard translation,” and focuses instead on the translator’s self-allegorization as a vital rhetorical surplus of Lu Xun’s translation practice. In particular, this essay scrutinizes Lu Xun’s rewriting of the Prometheus myth in his response to his critic, Liang Shiqiu. Lu Xun’s Prometheus is a translator embodying cannibalistic self-torment. I trace the theme of cannibalism in his other works, and compare the allegory of the cannibalistic translator to the Brazilian theory of translation as cannibalism. I argue that it is within this self-referential rhetoric that “hard translation” becomes a figure of the translator’s subjectivity and “labor of the negative.”]

Wu, Jun. “A Study on the Basic Theory of Lu Xun’s Literary Translation: ‘Everything Is an Intermediate Object.'” Frontiers of Literary Study in China 10, 3 (2016): 408-29.

Xie, Haiyan. “‘Grabbism’ and Untranslatability: Reinterpreting Lu Xun’s Position as a Translator.” Comparative Literature Studies 57, 1 (2020): 126-47.

[Abstract: Lu Xun’s translation discourse and his concept of “grabbism” (拿来主义 nalai zhuyi) are mutually constructed in a historical and evolutionary process. This article investigates how two different notions of “untranslatability” embedded in the discourse of Lu Xun’s translation interact with his constantly rectified idea of “grabbism.” Lu Xun’s translation process is replete with tensions and contradictions resonating with his simultaneous aspiration to and resistance against Western modernity. These tensions and contradictions are reflections of his self-contradiction between the collective responsibility of saving the nation by embracing Western modernity and a kind of unconscious reclamation of himself as a man of letters whose roots in Chinese tradition were less pronounced. Lu Xun’s translation practice along with his “grabbism” provides us an alternative perspective to understand the politics of translation beyond English contexts and sheds light on our reconceptualizing the nature of translation.]

Zhu, Ping. “The Masquerade of Male Masochists: Two Tales of Translation of the Zhou Brothers (Lu Xun and Zhou Zuoren) in the 1910s.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 8, 1 (March 2014): 31-51.

[Abstract: Through reading two creatively translated stories by the Zhou brothers, Lu Xun’s (Zhou Shuren) “The Soul of Sparta” (Sibada zhi hun, 1903) and Zhou Zuoren’s “The Chivalrous Slave Girl” (Xia nünu, 1904), this paper takes a close look at the intellectual trend in the first decade of the twentieth-century China of constructing strong and heroic women as the emblem of national power while rendering men as powerless. By focusing on a foreign heroine with traditional Chinese virtues, both translations creatively Sinicized and feminized the foreign power in the original tales. At the same time, male characters, prospective readers of the stories, and even authors themselves were marginalized, diminished, and ridiculed vis-à-vis the newly constructed feminine authority. Comparing this form of cultural masochism to other literary masochisms in modern China analyzed by Rey Chow and Jing Tsu respectively, this paper endeavors to excavate a hybrid model of nationalist agency grounded in the intertwined relationship of race, gender and nation. In my analysis, Gilles Deleuze’s discussion on masochism is utilized as a heuristic tool to shed light on the revolutionary potential embedded in the “strong women, weak men” complex in the 1910s. I argue that the cultural masochism in late Qing represents one of the earliest attempts of the Chinese intellectuals to creatively use Chinese traditional gender cosmology to absorb the threat of Western imperialism and put forward a hybrid model of nationalist agency.]

Scholarship

Chen, Guangchen. “The Hand, the Gaze, and the Voice: Lu Xun’s Transcription of Ancient Inscriptions.” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 40 (2019): 145-62.

[Abstract: This paper analyzes chao gubei 抄古碑 (transcribing ancient steles) as a significant obsession of Lu Xun’s prior to his becoming a famous writer in the May Fourth period. Striking moments in his literary works stemmed from this personal obsession. Even though Lu Xun’s transcribing of ancient steles can be considered a means to anesthetize himself, this paper argues that this act of transcription also serves to circumvent thinking and speech against the grain of the May Fourth period, when revolutionaries sought to facilitate the flow of thinking and speech in Chinese society by replacing the Chinese script with phonetic ones. After looking at Lu Xun’s transcribing of ancient steles, this paper examines how the purposelessness and materiality of this practice appears in Lu Xun’s fictional works, such as “A Madman’s Diary,” “Epitaph,” and “Kong Yiji.”]

Galik, Marian. “Archer Hou Yi According to Julius Zeyer (1841-1901) and Lu Xun (1881-1936): Changing Perceptions of Ancient Myths in Modern Literature.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 8, 3 (Sept. 2014): 359-73.

Kuo, Yu-heng. “Lu Hsun’s Comments on the Novel ‘Water Margin.'” In Lu Hsun: Writing for the Revolution. San Francisco: Red Sun Press, 1976, 167-74.

Liu Ts’un-yan. “Lu Xun and Classical Studies.” Papers on Far Eastern History 26 (Sept 1982): 119-44.

Wang, John C.Y. “Lu Xun as a Scholar of Traditional Chinese Literature.” In Leo Ou-fan Lee, ed. Lu Xun and His Legacy. Berkeley: UC Press, 1985, 90-103.

Letters

McDougall, Bonnie S. Love-Letters and Privacy in Modern China: The Intimate Lives of Lu Xun and Xu Guangping. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002.

McDougall, Bonnie S. “Functions and Values of Privacy in the Correspondence between Lu Xun and Xu Guangping, 1925-1929.” In Bonnie S. McDougall and Anders Hansson, eds., Chinese Concepts of Privacy. Leiden: Brill, 2002, 147-68.

Wang Dehou 王得厚. Liang di shu yanjiu 《两地书》研究 (Research into Letters between two). Tianjin: Tianjin renmin, 1982.

Visual Arts

Bevan, Paul. “Two Critiques by Lu Xun.” In Bevan, Intoxicating Shanghai–An Urban Montage: Art and Literature in Pictorial Magazines during Shanghai’s Jazz Age. Leiden, Brill, 2020, 141-85.

[Abstract: Analysis of two essays by Lu Xun critiquing the journal Wenyi huabao and its appropriation of forms of Western visual art]

Chen, Guangchen. “The Infinite Collection and the Mortal Collector: Lu Xun, Antique Market Revolutionary.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 32, no.1 (Spring 2020): 108-137.

Ding Cong 丁聪. Lu Xun xiaoshuo chatu 鲁迅小说插图 (Illustrations of Lu Xun’s fiction). Beijing: Renmin meishu, 1978.

Emrich, Elizabeth. “Modernity through Experimentation: Lu Xun and the Modern Chinese Woodcut Movement.” In Pei-yin Lin and Weipin Tsai , eds., Print, Profit, and Perception: Ideas, Information and Knowledge in Chinese Societies, 1895-1949. Leiden: Brill, 2014, 64-91.

—–. “Spilled Ink: Woodblock Print Artists and Lu Xun’s Literary and Theoretical Translations.” In Yifeng Sun and Chris Song, eds., Translating Chinese Art and Modern Literature. London: Routledge, 2019, 81-101.

Fan Zeng 范曾. Lu Xun xiaoshuo chatu ji 鲁迅小说插图集 (Illustrations to Lu Xun’s fiction). Beijing: Xinhua shudian, 1978.

Huiyi Lu Xun de meishu huodong 回忆鲁迅的美术活动 (Remembering Lu Xun’s fine arts activities). Beijing: Renmin meishu,1979.

Liu, Yiwen. “Witnessing Death: The Circulation of Lu Xun’s Postmortem Image.” TAP: Trans Asia Photography Review 9, 2 (Spring 2019).

Lu Xun bianyin huaji jicun 鲁迅编印画集辑存 (Illustration collections edited by Lu Xun. 3 vols. Shanghai: Shanghai renmin meishu, 1981. [vol.1: Carl Meffert’s “Cement” series; Kathe Kollwitz selected woodcuts; and “Muke jicheng” (木刻纪程); vol. 2: “Yinyu ji”; vol. 3: contains the five issues of the Yiyuan Zhaohua series]

Lu Xun cang Zhongguo xiandai muke quanji 鲁迅藏中国现代木刻全集 (Complete modern woodcuts in Lu Xun’s collection). 5 vols. Nanjing: Jiangsu guji, 1991.

Lu Xun lun lianhuanhua 鲁迅论连环画 (Lu Xun on serial picture books). Beijing: Renmin meishu, 1982. [contains LX’s writings on serial picture books]

Lu Xun yu dianying: ziliao huibian 鲁迅与电影: 资料汇编 (Lu Xun and film: collected materials). Beijing: Zhongguo dianying, 1981.

Peng Guoliang 彭国梁 and Yang Li’ang 杨里昂, eds., Gen Lu Xun pingtu pinhua 跟鲁迅评图品画 (An appreciation of paintings with Lu Xun). Changsha: Yueli shushe, 2004.

Qiu Sha 裘沙 and Wang Weijun 王伟君. Lu Xun zhi shijie quanji 鲁迅之世界全集 (Lu Xun’s world—complete works). 3 vols. Guangzhou: Guangdong jiaoyu, 1996.

[paintings and illustrations to Lu Xun’s writings by Qiu Sha and Wang Weijun, with a preface by Michelle Loi; vol. 1: essays; vol. 2: stories and prose; vol. 3: stories and other works]

Sun, Shirley Hsiao-ling. Lu Hsün and the Chinese Woodcut Movement, 1929-1936. Ph.d. diss. Stanford University, 1974.

Tang, Xiaobing. Origins of the Chinese Avant-Garde: The Modern Woodcut Movement. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

[Abstract:In Origins of the Chinese Avant-Garde, Xiaobing Tang studies the art and art theories of the first half of the twentieth century, when modern Chinese art and literature emerged. He argues that the most consequential expression of the avant-garde was the modern woodcut movement that thrived in China in the 1930s. In this innovative study—also the first comprehensive account of this Chinese movement available in English—Tang examines the aesthetic, intellectual, and social appeal of the modern woodcut and places the movement at the intersection of historical events, individual efforts, and competing discourses on art. He also shows how the woodcut movement drew upon international inspiration—from German Expressionism, Soviet wood engravings, and Japanese creative prints.]

Wang, Guanquan 王观泉. Lu Xun yu meishu 鲁迅与美术 (Lu Xun and fine arts). Shanghai: Shanghai renmin meishu, 1979.

Wang Xirong 王锡荣, ed. Lu Xun de yishu shijie 鲁迅的艺术世界. Nanjing: Jiangsu wenyi, 2009.

Wang Xirong 王锡荣 and Qiao Lihua 乔丽华, eds. Cangjia Lu Xun 藏家鲁迅. Shanghai: Shanghai wenhua, 2009.

Wang, Yiyan. “Lu Xun and China’s Art Practice: Conceptual Changes and Political Aims.” In Mabel Lee, Chiu-yee Cheung, and Sue Wiles, eds., Lu Xun and Australia. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly, 2016, 1178-88.