Ruth F. Weis LU XUN – A Chinese Writer for All Times

This book about a Chinese writer who was, at the same time, a poet and forceful social critic, does not attempt to be an academic study. 

Rather, it gives in-timate glimpses of what one individual from a quite different background gained from Lu Xun's writings through the years, especially during the "cultural revolution", and finding Lu Xun's remarks about his own time (1881-1936) really timeless and applicable long after his death. 

This personal study of Lu Xun's works was not even done from the original Chinese but mainly from the four-volume English translation by the husband-and-wife team, Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang. 

Ruth F. Weiss has been living in China for altogether 45 years. She knew Lu Xun in Shanghai in the 1930s and met many of the Chinese and foreign per-sonalities now remembered. Originally from Vienna, Austria where she completed her schooling with a Ph.D. degree from Vienna University in 1932, she came, to China for what, at first, was planned as a six-months-study trip and then became a life-long stay, interrupted only by five years' work in the United States. 

She has written for a number of German and English-language publications besides her regular work in China's publicity and lectured in Beijing and abroad about her China experience.