The literary genius of Lu Xun(1881-1936)comes in part from his ceaseless self-transformation. During his life, he was a fiction writer, poet, playwright, essayist, nationalist, socialist, revolutionary and political non-combatant. Our understandings of his work and life, drawn as they are from this great complexity, are especially susceptible to selection bias: we read the texts that support our own story of who Lu Xun was and what he meant to say. Eileen Cheng's excellent volume Literary Remains engages a particularly common and fundamental story we tell about Lu Xun, namely that he spent his literary career in one long struggle to defeat tradition, Confucian pieties, superstition and literati impotence. Rather than disprove this narrative -the "death" in the subtitle in part represents the death of the old culture - Cheng complicates it by demonstrating the wealth of classical Chinese writing and thought that informs Lu Xun's works, and the way in which the persistent currency of traditional culture in Lu's life shaped his art and politics.
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