Lu Xun – författare

Lu Xun (Lu Hsun) is arguably the greatest writer of modern China, and is considered by many to be the founder of modern Chinese literature. Lu Xun's stories both indict outdated Chinese traditions and embrace China's cultural richness and individuality. This volume presents brand-new translations by Julia Lovell of all of Lu Xun's stories, including 'The Real Story of Ah-Q', 'Diary of a Madman', 'A Comedy of Ducks', 'The Divorce' and 'A Public Example', among others. With an afterword by Yiyun Li.

The revolutionary writer and literary critic Lu Xun (Zhou Shuren, 1881–1936) is celebrated at home and abroad as one of the most groundbreaking and influential writers of modern China. A first-hand witness to China's social and political upheaval in the first half of the 20th century, he is remembered not only for his astute polemical essays and political articles but also for the short stories which explore the effects of contemporary social and cultural issues on the Chinese psyche.The stories in this collection are based on the 1955 compilation Lu Xun Xiao Shuo Ji, originally published in two collections, Call to Arms (1923) and At the Crossroads (1926). The ten stories included are: "Kuang ren riji" (A Madman's Diary), "Kong Yi Ji" (Kong Yiji), "Yao" (Medicine), "Mingtian" (Tomorrow), "Yi jian xiao shi" (An Incident), "Toufa de gushi" (A Story of Hair), "Fengbo" (Storm in a Teacup), "Guxiang" (My Old Home), "Zhufu" (New Year Sacrifice), and "Zai jiulou shang" (In the Restaurant).Targeted specifically for students of Chinese, the book is conveniently organized with the original Chinese text on the left-hand page and supplementary English explanations and Romanized spelling (pinyin) of difficult vocabulary, idiomatic expressions, and other phrases on the right (with more than 2,500 total). While literary and cultural treasures in themselves, Lu Xun's works have been largely inaccessible to students of Chinese, who often find themselves forced to constantly consult a dictionary while frequently missing important nuances in the text. This edition aims to eliminate such tedious and inefficient approaches to Lu Xun, while allowing students to appreciate these wonderful stories in the original Chinese.

A towering figure in the literary history of twentieth-century China, Lu Xun has exerted immense and continuous influence through his short stories, which remain today as powerful as they were first written. While echoes of these stories can still be heard in the fictional works from both sides of the Taiwan Strait in the eighties and nineties, "The True Story of Ah Q" has long become an intrinsic part of the Chinese vocabulary.Like many Chinese intellectuals searching for a solution to China's problems, Lu Xun went to Japan to study medicine, a choice he later abandoned for a career in writing, which he considered to be a far more effective weapon to save China. A prolific author of pungent and "dagger-like" essays, Lu Xun is also a tireless translator of Western critical and literary works. His fictional works have been translated into more than twenty languages.