In Search of a Self-Conscious Voice: Lu Xun's Appropriation of German Weltliteratur Sources

Acclaimed as the founder of modern Chinese literature, Lu Xun has received sustained attention from academics around the world. As he spent his entire life “searching for new voices from alien lands,” generations of scholars have explored how he “transculturated” foreign literature and culture, particularly using Japanese sources. Nevertheless, although it is well known that Lu Xun also relied on German sources, his connection to them remains unclear.

This article attempts to examine how Lu Xun drew on German Weltliteratur sources by focusing on his appropriation of Johannes Scherr's Illustrierte Geschichte der Weltliteratur (Illustrated History of World Literature). In his essay “On the Power of Mara Poetry”, Lu Xun absorbed Scherr's framework, while transforming his ideas creatively. On the one hand, Scherr integrated Hegel’s and Herder’s discourses on the world and the nation, and Lu Xun took Zhang Taiyan’s ideas as intermediaries, accepting Herder’s position of respecting national particularities and reviving national traditions in a world literary system. On the other hand, Scherr’s book was featured by a romantic nationalist view of literature, promoting imagination and nationality exemplified by the Byronic poets. Lu Xun not only combined various sources to forge his own theory on imagination and nationality, but used “resistance” and “revenge” as a basis for reconstructing the genealogy and image of the “Mara poets” and striving to stimulate the “self-conscious voice” among Chinese people.