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did take it for granted that their literary production was premised on a referential relation to a reality that existed beyond the texts they composed.” I encountered a touching instance of this assumption of transparency when, in 1986, during a visit to the Lu Xun Museum in Shaoxing, I met a man who was introduced as the grandson of “Runtu,” a character from the story “My Old Home,” that was “based” on one of Lu Xun’s childhood friends.

13. Průšek, The Lyrical and the Epic, 71.

14. Lee, “Tradition and Modernity,” in Lu Xun and His Legacy, ed. Lee, 3. The Mao quote was translated by Lyell, Lu Hsün’s Vision of Reality, vii.

15. Chou in Memory, Violence, Queues, especially in the “Introduction,” 1–18, provided an excellent overview of the critical discussion and the constraints under which scholars labored during the Maoist period and sketched the general direction of the scholarly discussion of Lu Xun in post-Maoist China up through the first decade of the new millennium.

16. Zhang Longxi, “Out of the Cultural Ghetto,” 71–101.

17. China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) database 知网空间, www.cnki.com.cn, accessed August 2015. My quick scan of abstracts of recent articles in that database suggested, in terms of volume, that the social critique still stands as the primary approach. Zhang Mengyang provided a thorough overview of the critical discussion of Lu Xun’s work in China, supplying detailed bibliographic references for each of the major critics, and for each summarizing their unique contribution to research on Lu Xun. His work supports this observation as well. See Zhang Mengyang, Lu Xun xue.

18. See, for example, Huters, “Blossoms in the Snow” and “Lu Xun and the Crisis of Figuration” in his Bringing the World Home; and Anderson, The Limits of Realism. I also addressed the issue of meaning as a function of structure in my analysis of the story “The New Year’s Sacrifice,” in my article “The Paradigm of the Iron House.” My thanks to CLEAR for permission to use parts of my article in this book. See especially Wang Hui, Fankang juewang, especially Part 3.

19. See Peter Button, Configurations of the Real, which marshals continental philosophy and literary theory to investigate relationships between the May 4th writers’ views of realist representation and that of later social realist writers.

20. See, for example, Tang’s poststructuralist discourse and sensitive interpretations in Chinese Modern. See also Jian Xu, “The Will to the Transaesthetic,” 63, which summarizes the contrast between approaches that see