Lu Xun - The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China: The Complete Fiction of Lu Xun (Penguin Classics)

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 nations 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 Chinas 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 countrys 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 Chinas pivotal moment of westernizing cultural revolution. The two volumes of short fiction he produced between 1918 and 1925, Outcry and Hesitation , won broad acclaim for their highly crafted portrayals of a China in a state of spiritual emergency of its superstition, backwardness, poverty and complacence. Like many radical intellectuals of his time, Lu Xun began to look leftwards after the rise to power of the repressively right-wing Nationalist Party in the late 1920s. Despite his public commitment to Marxist literary ideals and his posthumous canonization by Mao Zedong, Lu Xuns final years were spent mired in squabbles with the Chinese Communist Partys representatives of ideological orthodoxy. When he died of tuberculosis in 1936, he bequeathed to modern Chinese letters a contradictory legacy of cosmopolitan independence, polemical fractiousness and anxious patriotism that continues to resonate in Chinese intellectual life today.

JULIA LOVELL has translated the novels I Love Dollars by Zhu Wen, Serve the People by Yan Lianke and A Dictionary of Maqiao by Han Shaogong. She has also edited and translated in part Lust, Caution , a collection of short stories by Eileen Chang. A lecturer in Chinese history at the University of London, she is the author of The Great Wall: China against the World, 1000 BC AD2000 and The Politics of Cultural Capital: Chinas Quest for a Nobel Prize in Literature .

YIYUN LI grew up in Beijing and moved to the United States in 1996. Her stories and essays have been published in the New Yorker , Best American Short Stories , O Henry Prize Stories and elsewhere. Her debut collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers , won the Frank OConnor International Short Story Award, PEN/Hemingway Award and Guardian First Book Award; it was also shortlisted for the Orange Prize for New Writers. She was selected by Granta as one of the twenty-one Best Young American Novelists under thirty-five. Her first novel, The Vagrants , was recently published.

Translated with an Introduction by
JULIA LOVELL

With an Afterword by
YIYUN LI

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This translation first published in Penguin Classics 2009

Translation and editorial material copyright Julia Lovell, 2009

Afterword copyright Yiyun Li, 2009

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The moral right of the translator and editors has been asserted

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ISBN: 978-0-14-119418-9