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.

In this book Lu Xun's “refusal to mourn” does not mean that that Lu Xun did not grieve at the loss of traditional culture, but that he intentionally and persistently kept the questions raised by classical erudition open to criticism, extending and repeating the trauma of the passage from past to present. Indeed, the book's basic archive is drawn from Lu's eulogies, parodies of traditional literature, and writings on death both figurative and literal: in many pieces his grief at the losses of the early 20th century is palpable. Part one re-reads the preface to Call to Arms as a part of the long-standing Chinese tradition of prefaces, as well as a participant in the genre of biography. It does so in part by reading the preface alongside lesser-known texts like Lu Xun's essay “Liberation of the preface” (Xu de jiefang) and his posthumous biography of Fan Ainong. Part two looks at the life of traditional literature in Lu Xun's criticism of the New Culture movement: his discomfort with the spectacle created by female revolutionaries like Qiu Jin, his criticism of Ibsen's “Nora” from A Doll's House, and his use of the native home or guxiang as a site for disintegration, displacement and loss. Part three reads the last creative work Lu Xun ever completed, the 1935 collection Old Tales Retold (Gushi xin bian), which performs another parodic and traumatic destabilization of traditional literature, one whose critique is designed to confront the hypocrisies of the 1930s as well as those of old China. Each part juxtaposes Lu Xun's work with the traditional texts that occasion it, such as the moral biographies of Sima Qian and the revolutionarily countercultural poets of the Jin dynasty. These individual readings and juxtapositions are fascinating, novel and extremely careful: this is not a book whose best thinking is done in the introduction, but rather one whose engagement with its texts transforms our understanding and sets a model for other scholars.

The ambition of Literary Remains necessarily strays into readings and interpretations that one or another reader might find unconvincing. The monograph has a pattern of asserting the unintelligibility of Lu Xun's writing, often in the same breath as it interprets that writing. “Diary of a madman” (Kuangren riji) is described as “filled with musings not entirely intelligible to its readers” (p. 9), parts of Old Tales Retold are dismissed as “absurd and nonsensical” (p. 14), and poems in Wild Grass (Ye cao) are described as “bizarrely incoherent” (p. 227), although the incoherent musings, tales and poems referred to are not specifically identified. What seems to be at issue is not a series of strange lapses on Lu Xun's part, or a simplistic form-follows-function fracturing of narratives in a fractured world, but Cheng's assumption of narrative and allegorical logics in artworks where symbolist and associative logics predominate. The single concrete example Cheng offers is the discussion of “Epitaph” from Wild Grass: where Cheng reads “the perverse pleasure of cryptography” (p. 227), other readers might see elemental symbols of the devourer and the devoured, the living and the dead, staged in such a way as to generate (rather than represent or describe) insights into death and the self.

Faults included, this monograph should be required reading for scholars of Lu Xun and modern literature. It additionally has much to offer those who study pre-modern literature, as it demonstrates the fundamental inscription of old culture in the New Culture Movement, and the classical ideologies that circulate through Chinese modernity. The clarity of its prose makes it appropriate to teach, likely in excerpt, to advanced students of literature in translation: with luck, it will induce another generation of rigorous, open-minded reading and thereby reveal new facets hidden by our still-partial understanding of Lu Xun and his work.