Lu Xun' Writing Analysis

Zhou Shuren, who adopted the pen name Lu Xun, was born September 25 into a family of declining social status in Shaoxing, Zhejiang Province. His grandfather directed his schooling, which was less rigid than a traditional education. By age 11, he was an avid reader of popular literature and nonfiction but lacked interest in classical Confucian texts. Considered the founder of modern Chinese literature, Lu Xun holds a place in contemporary Chinese art and culture virtually unrivaled by any other writer. Regarded as a national hero and canonized by the Chinese Communist Party, Lu Xun has been revered as the intellectual source of the Chinese Revolution who prepared the ideological ground for Mao Zedong. Despite attempts to co-opt Lu Xun for narrower political purposes, he remains a central figure in the transition of Chinese thought and consciousness to modern awareness, as important in the formation of modern expression as Du Fu and Li Bohave been in classical Chinese poetry and Cao Xueqin in the Chinese novel. Hu Shih's article took the literary world by storm. By the time that the second beginning of modernism rolled around on May 4, 1919, experiments in baihua literature were already underway. Hu Shih published several baihua poems in January 1918, and in May, Lu Xun published what is regarded as the first Chinese modernist short story, "Diary of a Madman." A vicious satire that attacks the old Chinese morality, the story is about a paranoid man who suspects all of conspiring to kill and eat him (Lyell, pp. 19).

While still in Tokyo, Lu Xun edited the journal New Life and published essays in the Communist journal Henan on Western philosophy, sometimes collaborating with his brother, the writer Zhou Zuoren. In 1909, he returned to China and taught middle-school biology in Hangzhou and Shaoxing. After the Nationalist Revolution in 1911, Lu Xun accepted a position with the education ministry, where he studied and compiled Buddhist sutras. He began to publish poems and fiction in the popular journal New Youth in 1918, including "The Diary of a Madman," a short story about a man who suffers from paranoid delusions of the widespread practice of cannibalism. "Diary of a Madman." The story appeared in the journal Xinqingnian (New youth) that would initiate the May Fourth Movement, the intellectual revolution sparked by Chinese opposition to the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. Although Lu Xun remained apart from the movement, its repudiation of classical Chinese literature is reflected in his short story, regarded as China's first modern short story due to its use of the vernacular and its critique of traditional Chinese culture. Narrated in 13 diary entries, the story details the increasingly paranoid dementia of the protagonist, whose heightened sensitivity reveals a vision of China as a society that feeds on itself. Parodying the self-enclosed world of Chinese scholarship and tradition bound by precedent, the story provides a searing social indictment artfully presented in a multilayered, subjective narrative. It is considered the first Chinese modernist ...