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thanks to Eva Chou, who in Memories, Violence, Queues, identified and translated this quote (232).

30. Larson, From Ah Q to Lei Feng, 82.

31. Larson, 77–96. This brief description greatly simplifies Larson’s analysis, which also revealed the continuities in approach of Confucian culture, with its emphasis on mental attributes, and Chairman Mao Zedong’s revision of Marxist doctrine away from an emphasis on historical laws and materiality towards one on proper mentality and correct thinking. I have generalized Larson’s focus on power relationships to encompass all dimensions of one’s relationship with the external world.

32. Lin in The Crisis of Chinese Consciousness makes a similar argument—that the underlying premise of Chinese tradition, shared by May 4th intellectuals, their immediate predecessor generation, and the Maoists, was that meaningful political and social change depended on the complete transformation of the people’s spirit and values. See especially Lin’s “Introduction” and chapter 3.

33. Tsu in Failure, Nationalism, and Literature (214–215) is among the few critics to specifically address suffering as a primary concern of Lu Xun and some of his cohort.

34. Lee, Voices from the Iron House (50, 59–60).

35. See, for example, Gu’s discussion in “Polysemia,” (448–449) of the relationship between the preface and the diary of “A Madman’s Diary.” See also Huter’s analysis in “Blossoms in the Snow” (66–71) of morally unreliable narrators.

36. Gu, “Polysemia” (434–453) argued strenuously against unitary readings of Lu Xun’s short stories.

37. Anderson in The Limits of Realism argued that Lu Xun structured several stories so as to prevent the reader’s experiencing the emotional release of catharsis, a line of thought that Huters, Cheng, and others have developed (89–91). More recently Button in Configurations of the Real has taken a contrary position, arguing that mimesis would be more important than catharsis (54–60). Others, such as Chou, “Learning to Read Lu Xun” staked out a more historical approach to reader-response criticism. I have deliberately bypassed this debate.

38. Zhang Longxi, “Out of the Ghetto,” 97. Zhang was primarily addressing those Chinese critics who were dismayed to discover that, now that they had been freed by the end of the Maoist era to think about literature as personal expression, Western critical discourse had taken a political turn