| Chapter : | Introduction |
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works of Western thought into Chinese continued throughout his life. In 1906, hoping to launch a literary movement, with a few friends he initiated a literary journal devoted to increasing knowledge of Western works that would, they hoped, bring fresh new thinking from the West to their Chinese compatriots. The times were not ripe, and the journal failed. A subsequent effort at translation met a similarly discouraging fate. His hopes of serving as an enlightening warrior of the human spirit were dashed; his aspiration of launching a literary revolution would turn out to be premature.
Major changes were transpiring in China. The Qing dynasty fell in 1912, and the Chinese Republic was founded that same year. However, rather than achieving a functioning, constitutional state, the political situation rapidly devolved into a power struggle among competing military strong men that weakened central government authority. Initially encouraged by the founding of the Chinese Republic, Lu Xun had been sorely disappointed by the lack of substantive change following the revolution, by the brutality of successive political regimes, and by what seemed to him the ferocious hold of the past on the present. His depression over the deteriorating political climate was only compounded by personal disappointment over his failed literary enterprise.
Upon returning to China, he taught science in local schools until, in 1912, he was invited to join the Ministry of Education. In addition to his modest bureaucratic duties in the capital, now moved to Beijing, he devoted the next several years to quiet scholarly pursuits that included gathering materials for his groundbreaking study, Brief History of Chinese Fiction (Zhongguo xiaoshuo shi lüe 中国小说史略), which was published in two volumes in 1923–1924. That work applied serious textual research to a genre that had been considered trivial, and it was the first scholarly history of premodern Chinese vernacular literature. A significant intellectual achievement, its judgments are still cited today.4
Accompanying the political turmoil of the early decades of the century was rapid expansion of economic and cultural activity in key coastal cities.