ABSTRACT
Lu Xun has been hailed as the greatest Chinese writer of the twentieth century and the father of modern Chinese literature. He was born into an impoverished gentry family in Shaoxing, Zhejiang province. While studying abroad in Japan from 1902 to 1909, first medicine and then literature, his patriotic spirit was aroused and his vision of transforming the Chinese national character through literature in order to save China was formed. His first literary endeavours failed or did not attract much attention, but his short stories written in the vernacular, starting with “Kuangren riji” (The Diary of a Madman), published in 1918, had a great impact on the creation of a new Chinese literature. Lu Xun became one of the sharpest critics of Chinese tradition, denouncing the hypocrisy of Confucianism and the “cannibalism” practised in Chinese society.
