Book Review: Outcry by Lu Xun

I read some of Luxun's stories in Outcry in Chinese over a year ago, and did not think his writing was anything special; I like him a lot more reading in English.

I read Outcry as the moment when a new subject in Chinese literature emerged (I don't have enough knowledge about Chinese lit. to go too far with this hypothesis). This I related with the work of Korean nationalist historian Sin Chae-Ho, who criticized Korean historiography as being that of Confucian histories of the state (국사), which obscured the 'eternal' history of the Korean national subject (민족사). 

Read, for example, the celebrated preface of "the Real Story of Ah-Q," where Luxun's ambivalent narrator searches for a new literary form through which the story of Ah-Q (Ah-Q's name is also in a form inexpressible to Chinese printers at the time) can be expressed:

"My first quandary is a title... Lives are written in a myriad firms: as official biographies of the great and good, autobiographies, legends, unauthorized biographies, ... What place could the life of the miserable Ah-Q have next to the glorious, official biographies of the rich and famous installed in our hallowed court histories?"

I also read "A Minor Incident" in this way, the scholar-class I protagonist experiences a moment of horizontal, popular nationalism (à la Anderson) as subjects of feudal, hierarchical, pre-modern China become Chinese.

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