Lu Xun and World Literature

In Lu Xun and World Literature, Xiaolu Ma, Carlos Rojas, and other contributors examine various aspects of Lu Xun, who is known as the father of modern Chinese literature. Essays in this book focus on Lu Xun’s works in relation to the notions of world literature and processes of literary worlding. The contributors offer detailed analyses of Lu Xun’s own literary oeuvre and of foreign works that engage with his writings. This volume also focuses on many facets of the publication and dissemination of Lu Xun’s works’, from printing and binding to the discussions and debates that followed their release in China and abroad. This book not only makes an important contribution to the field of Lu Xun studies, but also proposes a reexamination of the category of world literature.

Xiaolu Ma is assistant professor of humanities at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Carlos Rojas is professor of Chinese cultural studies and gender, sexuality, and feminist studies at Duke University.

“This exceptional volume sheds new and important light on the increasingly incumbent question of the relationship between the literary giant Lu Xun and world literature. Rather than dwell on how the author’s work fits into some pre-existing rubric, the essays in this volume explore new territory in investigating how Lu Xun’s work contributes to the way in which the character of world literature itself must be continually reconstructed and reimagined.”

—Theodore D. Huters, University of California, Los Angeles

“This volume examines questions surrounding the relationship between Lu Xun, world literature, and the underlying processes of ‘worlding’—situating his work as a writer and a translator in a global context, both among and interacting with prominent international works and literary movements, as well as influencing writers and readers in countries well beyond China. As such, it is a milestone in our understanding of this challenging, always witty and engaging, gadfly of the state. Just as Lu Xun and His Legacy, edited by Leo Ou-fan Lee, brought together much of the best in twentieth-century scholarship on Lu Xun, ours is a massive dose of good fortune to have Lu Xun and World Literature to steer us into the twenty-first.”

—Jon Eugene von Kowallis, University of New South Wales, Sydney, author of The Lyrical Lu Xun: A Study of His Classical-Style Verse