SOURCE: "The Morality of Form: Lu Xun and the Modern Chinese Short Story," in Lu Xun and His Legacy, edited by Leo Ou-fan Lee, University of California Press, 1985, pp. 32-53.

The following excerpt is taken from an essay first presented at a 1981 conference marking the centennial of Lu Hsün's birth. Anderson here examines the social and ethical as well as literary implications of Lu Hsün's experimentation with Western literary forms in his short stories.

Few works in literary history occupy as crucial a junction as the twenty-five short stories collected in Lu Xun's The Outcry (or Call to Arms, 1923) and Hesitation (or Wandering, 1926). They simultaneously made real the call for a new colloquial language in fiction, convincingly naturalized a foreign literary form, and fundamentally redefined for a generation of Chinese writers the value of the enterprise of fiction. It is toward an appraisal of this last...