LU XUN, the Canon, and Cultural Capital in China from the 1920s to 2017 by Yang Ke

Copyright 2021
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.
Maria Luisa Torres Reyes, PhD Professor
Editor-in-Chief, UNITAS Journal Scholar-in-Residence
University of Santo Tomas
The book argues that Lu Xun’s appearance (and disappearance) from textbooks lays bare the conditions and contradictions of canon formation in China, and demonstrates—considering the changes in Lu Xun’s canonical status—the tenuous inseparability between literature and ideology. It offers readers from the Philippines and elsewhere a glimpse of the processes of canon formation, particularly as grounded in, and conditioned by, the transforming political situation in China. Her study shows the potentials and limitations of Western theory, especially as applied to the Asian context. Finally, her study provides a new methodological approach with which a globally recognized author such as Lu Xun may be studied.
Vincenz Serrano, PhD
Associate Professor, Department of English Editor, Kritika Kultura
School of Humanities
Ateneo de Manila University