"Personal" in the early texts of Lu Xun

Author: Wang Weidong
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-04-01
Features: This book adopts a method of lexical analysis, using The Complete Works of Lu Xun as its textual scope. It studies the certainty, wholeness, and evolution of the concept of "the individual" in Lu Xun's early works (roughly divided by 1927, including the Japanese period, the decade of seclusion, the New Youth period, and the Wild Grass period). Based on this foundation, it explores the intellectual origins, complexity, creativity, and problems of Lu Xun's concept of "the individual" against the backdrop of Chinese and Western intellectual history. Through a textual analysis of Lu Xun's early concept of "the individual," this book not only attempts to reconstruct Lu Xun's related thoughts within his texts to establish objectivity but also seeks to discover how Lu Xun "appropriated" and integrated different modernity concepts from various sources into a unified intellectual landscape. This selective and integrative approach rooted in his own cultural tradition—where Lu Xun accepted the Western concept of "the individual" through his understanding of the Chinese "self"—what kind of intellectual originality it produced and what reflective intellectual issues it contains.