Review by Choice Review
Davies (Monash Univ.), author of Worrying about China (CH, Apr'08, 45-4211), focuses on Lu Xun's final decade of life and work (1927-1936) as a prominent polemical essayist involved in a series of protracted and bitter literary feuds with other Chinese intellectuals. After publishing two distinguished collections of Chinese short fiction set in contemporary times during 1920s, Lu Xun abandoned further attempts at fiction except for his 1936 volume lampooning ancient culture heroes, Old Tales Retold--a subject that Davies is curiously silent about. Lu Xun's favorite medium for the aforesaid feuds was "miscellaneous prose" (zawen), the post-1932 term for his essays that is missing in Davies's account, which instead sticks to the pre-1932 term zagan ("mixed impressions"). Davies skillfully captures the repartee of Lu Xun's polemics and engagingly surveys his reception by later generations. Yet her semi-hagiographical approach to the writer she often lionizes as "the maestro" prevents her from criticizing the pettier side of Lu Xun's personal attacks on scholars such as Gu Jiegang. This incapacity to present Lu Xun in the round makes her book pale beside David Pollard's more balanced The True Story of Lu Xun (2002). Nor has Davies compiled a bibliography or a Chinese-character glossary. Summing Up: Recommended. For collections serving graduate students and faculty. P. F. Williams Montana State University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
China's prewar literary lion carries on a conflicted, fractious relationship with the gathering revolution in this tepid study. Historian and literary scholar Davies explores Lu's career in the decade before his death in 1936, when he was a leading left-wing writer and polemicist in a period of intense strife between China's Nationalist government and Communist Party. While Lu was canonized by Mao as an exponent of revolutionary violence, Davies emphasizes his antiauthoritarian humanist streak. (Mao also allowed that Lu would have been imprisoned under the Communist regime.) Through his vitriolic debates with Marxist opponents in literary journals, Davies traces Lu's complex ideas as a believer in revolution who deplored its violence, a supporter of the masses who championed individual conscience, and a man of the left who resisted Party dogmas. In close exegeses of his writings, she teases out the links between his politics and his literary innovations, particularly his pioneering use of the baihua vernacular. Lu emerges as a vibrant writer grappling with leftist intellectual dilemmas. Unfortunately, Davies's somewhat disorganized text and staid academic prose drain much of the drama from Lu's story. Hers is a rather bloodless take on a powerful writer and his bloody times. Photos. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Lu Xun (his pen name) (1881-1936) is best known for his short stories from China's New Culture period (1919-23), in which he mounted uncompromising satires of China's dead-end authoritarianism, of moribund Confucian culture for producing it, and of spineless intellectuals for accepting it. Davies (intellectual history, Monash Univ., Australia) here covers the essays and polemics of the following period, the "years on the left" (1927-36). Lu Xun argued that revolution was necessary but criticized "revolutionary literature" as "hit, hit, hit, kill, kill, kill, revolt, revolt, revolt," merely fodder for the propagandists. Davies brings to life the "hazy" intellectual politics in 1930's Shanghai; controversies with both leftist and elitist writers; the literary art of the new vernacular and denunciation of those who would deny its use to the masses; and Mao Zedong's misappropriation of his legacy. Verdict General readers should start with the fiction, translated most recently by Julia Lovell, The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China: The Complete Fiction of Lu Xun, but Davies offers an accessible, absorbing, follow up.-Charles Hayford, Evanston, IL (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A critical analysis of the political and polemical essays of Chinese writer Lu Xun (18811936), whose literary stature remains Olympian. Though Davies (Chinese Studies/Monash Univ.; Worrying about China: The Language of Chinese Critical Inquiry, 2009, etc.) doesn't focus closely on biographical details, numerous details about Lu Xun's life do emerge. (Very early, we learn his favorite brand of cigarettes; later, a bit about his married life and contentious relationship with his brother.) Davies focuses on Lu Xun's pioneering literary uses of baihua (the common language) and on his literary contributions to the revolutionary turmoil in China in the 1920s and '30s, a turmoil that eventually forced him to publish using as many as 140 pseudonyms. The author notes that his celebrity afforded him some safety in the most perilous times. Readers will discover almost immediately that Davies' is principally an academic work: The tone is scholarly, and literary allusions populate her prose--Foucault, Heidegger, Jung, Sartre, Derrida and many others. She employs numerous block quotations and sometimes-dense diction: "In using ambulatory tropes to anthropomorphize language Lu Xuntransfigured the act of writing into an agon of self-reflection on the road to attaining humanness." However, the range of Davies' research is staggering, and her erudition is impressive as she glides through Lu Xun's literary career. She deals frankly and comprehensively with Lu Xun's most prominent critics and notes how he handled them with intensity and agility. She has much to say, as well, about his theories of writing--how he decried political rhetoric, despised romantic fiction and saw the moral ambiguity of revolutionary writing. She also reproduces his list of eight tips for aspiring writers--among them: "Don't force yourself to write when you feel you can't." A rich, scholarly work that will attract more academic than general readers.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
