This book studies the works of Lu Xun, the greatest modern writer in China, not from the perspective of the “text itself ” as might have been expected. While the book’s “close reading” proves apropos to the texts and textbooks under study, it had the unexpected effect of producing a kind of refraction of the politics surrounding the works’ public reception. As a reception study of many decades of reading Lu Xun through Chinese textbooks, the book locates meaning in that contested space between the rich if contradictory context and the modern aesthetic of the “text itself.” In this way, the interrogation of Lu Xun’s reception becomes a critical reading strategy for inquiring into the apparent instability in Lu Xun’s canonical status in China, in which his works’ symbolic “cultural capital” historically waxed and waned.

1.Lu, Xun ? 1881-1936.