TheRealStoryofAh-QandOtherTalesofChina_T.epub

PENGUIN CLASSICS THE REAL STORY OF AH-Q AND OTHER TALES OF CHINA LU XUN is one of the paradigmatic figures of twentieth-century Chinese literature, celebrated during and since his lifetime for his powerful diagnoses of his nation’s social and political crisis, and for his contributions to reinventing the vernacular as a literary language. Born in 1881 into a scholar- gentry family in Shaoxing (south-east China), he was thoroughly schooled as a child in China’s classical literary heritage. After abandoning in 1899 the orthodox Confucian path of studying for the imperial civil service examinations, Lu Xun read widely in translations of foreign literature and applied himself to Western science, first in China and then in Japan, where he began training as a doctor. Intensely troubled by his country’s weakness in the face of foreign imperialism, at the age of twenty-five he decided to give up medicine for a career in literary and cultural reform. In 1918, the forceful iconoclasm of his first short story in vernacular Chinese, ‘Diary of a Madman’, helped propel him to the centre of the New Culture Movement of the late 1910s – modern China......