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Preface The main draft of this book was completed as I left Hong Kong after eighteen years teaching in Comparative Literature. Early in that time I was introduced to the work of Lu Xun by my friend Gordon Osing, then from Memphis State University, who was on loan to our Department from 1989 to 1991, and with whom I travelled to Shanghai, and to Hangzhou and Shaoxing, where I was able to see where Lu Xun had lived, and to buy, in the Jinjiang hotel in Shanghai, the four-volume Selected Works, from which I have been working while writing. I could never have started thinking about Lu Xun otherwise, for I had certainly never come across his name in Britain. Many years later, Leo Ou-fan Lee, in conversation, and also on loan to our Department, told me that if I wanted to work on modern Chinese literature, I should go for Lu Xun, and I have taken his advice. Since starting to write, with the aid of a grant from the University of Hong Kong’s Louis Cha fund, which I am glad to acknowledge, I have been much in the debt of an ex-PhD student of mine, Lin Qingxin, of Peking University. He, among other things, took me to see the Lu Xun museum in Beijing, and the house where Lu Xun settled his mother and wife, and then, for further good measure, took me to the Lao She house in Beijing. Others who have helped with this writing have included Chan Wai-chung, Stephen Pang Ka-wing and Liam Liu Chi-shing, all of whom have bought to help me various editions of Lu Xun in various languages. Among research assistants who have been helpful, I must recall the names of Pablo Tsoi Tse-pang, an enthusiast for Lu Xun as much as for Joyce, which is his specialist area, Lee Chi-leung, and viii Preface Ian Fong Ho-yin, whose help has been immeasurable. These have known better than me what I ought to be reading and have made it available to me, and have done much to make life smoother. Others who have helped me intellectually in the past two years, when this book was being written, include Q. S. Tong, and Paul Smethurst, and Stuart Christie, and Mao Sihui and Louis Lo Wai-chun: to all of these I give my thanks. And thanks to Dr Colin Day, the publisher: he has taken a gamble in publishing a work on Lu Xun that gives virtually no account of the Chinese of the text; his willingness, his vision, and his comments, and those of the readers for Hong Kong University Press, are much appreciated. And thanks to Phoebe Chan Sui-wah for expert editing for the Press. Completing the final draft of the book in England, in Manchester University, among new and very different and fine colleagues, but where there is inevitably much less awareness of Lu Xun, reminds me more of the function of this book: its only intention is to make his short stories as interesting to others as they have been to me; crucial texts within Chinese modernism. But as I complete, I thank not only those who made teaching and research in Hong Kong so rewarding, but all those named who helped specifically with writing on Lu Xun: I dedicate the book to them. ...

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