ABSTRACT
After the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, literature was increasingly institutionalized by the state, both retrospectively and for the time to come. While contemporary writers were included into the China Writers Association or the China Federation of Literature and Art Circles, the literary estates of past writers were enshrined in museums, often established in the writers’ former residences. This contribution begins its investigation with the establishment of museums dedicated to Lu Xun (1881-1936) during the early and mid-1950s. They were the start of an important development in Chinese literature: the author was to receive a public and tangible place of commemoration in Chinese society and also to be included into a global pantheon of world authors commemorated in author museums across Europe and the Soviet Union. Instead of focusing on one particular museum, this contribution maps the Chinese literary field at the time in which author museums became key institutional actors. Chinese author museums changed not only how writers were remembered and how their literary works were read but also which writers were remembered, and which forgotten. Museums acquired power in the force field of literary production, reception, and criticism. New theories and research methods have led scholars to re-evaluate the trajectories through which certain texts and writers entered into the canon of world literature. They have identified which historical actors guided, hindered, facilitated, or forced the author to become representative of a certain genre, nation, script, or voice and thereby shape societies’ memory of the writer. Museums became key in defining literary value and in defining whether an author’s reach would become global. Author museums are therefore an important part of the spatial, material, and global turns in literary studies which have raised questions about the processes though which world literature is constituted.
