ABSTRACT
Lu Xun's assimilation into world literature as national allegorist and then as modernist makes him accessible to worldly readers as a Chinese writer, but one who circulates in a transnational economy of similarly nationalistic–in the first case–or introspective–in the second–writers. As both a reader and an object of reading, Lu Xun offers a position and politics: he and his texts illustrate the negotiation of Chinese literary tradition, contemporary political exigencies, and transnational aesthetic discourses. Lu Xun's own work pursues the demotic both contemporarily and historically in Chinese as well as in his broader reading. Lu Xun's "hard translation" provided method of negotiating foreign influence with an eye towards reshaping the domestic. His resistance to imperial domination was tempered by his recognition of the reality of the globalizing world. Lu Xun's philological efforts into Chinese fiction showed him the variations and multiplicities that existed among texts as well as the various uses to which those texts were put.
