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Audiobook edition · 4 h 16 minPaperback · 6 × 9 in · printing soonHardcover · 6 × 9 in · printing soonAbout this book
How does street gossip grow into a tradition of long novels, strange tales, and sharp social satire?
In A Brief History of Chinese Fiction, Lu Xun follows Chinese storytelling from ancient myth to the novels of the Ming and Qing dynasties. He begins with a question: what does fiction mean? The word xiaoshuo once means small talk—the gossip and odd sayings that serious writers leave aside.
Fiction receives little space in the old catalogues of learning. Lu Xun gives it close attention, tracing how one kind of story grows into another. Drawing on his lectures at Peking University, he names works, groups them into schools, and offers plain judgments. You follow a writer who knows stories from the inside.
What you’ll discover
- Myths and uncanny tales Explore ancient beginnings and Six Dynasties accounts of spirits, strange events, and wit.
- Stories told as stories See why Lu Xun finds a turning point in the deliberate storytelling of Tang writers.
- Voices in the teahouse Meet Song storytellers bringing love, crime, ghosts, and war before ordinary crowds.
- The long novel unfolds Follow historical romances into Ming novels of war, gods, and demons.
- Households, manners, and satire Encounter The Plum in the Golden Vase and Lu Xun’s discussion of novels of daily life.
Who will love it
Readers who like to see how stories evolve will enjoy this book, as will fans of Chinese novels, ghost tales and folk storytelling, and students of literature.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- Stories reveal a changing tradition
- Fiction begins in scattered legends
- Ghosts belong beside everyday events
- Tang writers consciously shape their tales
- Street storytellers give fiction its voice
- Great novels reshape inherited stories
- Everyday ambitions move into fiction
- Qing fiction deepens its social vision
- New forms carry older habits forward
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A Brief History of Chinese Fiction
by Lu Xun · 1923
A man carries a ghost on his back, then sells it as a sheep, and Chinese fiction is just getting started.
Challenging10–20 hours to read2 languages
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In short
A man meets a ghost on a dark road. He claims to be a ghost too, carries the creature to the market, and sells it as a sheep for fifteen hundred coins.
A Brief History of Chinese Fiction at a glance
- Reading time
- About 12 h 15 min9 h 45 min fast, 14 h 35 min slow
- Length
- 175,400 words
- Library level
- Challenging long sentences, a rich vocabulary
- First published
- 1923by Lu Xun
Reading time at 238 words a minute (fast 300, slow 200). How long the classics take to read · Updated
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
Fiction grows from myth and borrowed names
The word for fiction first appears in the Zhuangzi, where it means trivial talk far from the true way. Later the scholar Huan Tan describes fiction writers as men who gather scraps and short sayings and make short books from them. Even then such books were called useless.
The Han dynasty book list names fifteen works of this kind and says they came from minor officials who gathered street gossip. Lu Xun points out that none of the fifteen survives. Several are attached to ancient figures, so they look like later borrowings.
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Details
- First published
- 1923
- Language
- English
- Level
- Challenging
Cite this edition
Lu, Xun. A Brief History of Chinese Fiction. Library of Alexandria, 2026, libraryofalexandria.com/products/a-brief-history-of-chinese-fiction.
Lu, X. (2026). A brief history of Chinese fiction. Library of Alexandria. https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/a-brief-history-of-chinese-fiction (Original work published 1923)
Lu, Xun. A Brief History of Chinese Fiction. Library of Alexandria, 2026. https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/a-brief-history-of-chinese-fiction.
@book{lu2026brief,
author = {Lu, Xun},
title = {A Brief History of Chinese Fiction},
publisher = {Library of Alexandria},
year = {2026},
url = {https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/a-brief-history-of-chinese-fiction},
note = {First published 1923}
}
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What is A Brief History of Chinese Fiction about?
It traces Chinese storytelling from ancient myth through ghost books, Tang romances, Song storytellers and the Ming and Qing novels, naming the main works, their authors and how each form changed the next.
Who was Lu Xun?
Lu Xun, who died in 1936, was a leading modern Chinese writer of stories and essays. He also collected old tales and taught the history of fiction, which is the source of this book.
What does chuanqi mean in this book?
Chuanqi means tales of the strange. It names the longer, polished Tang stories that writers invented on purpose, such as the dream of the pillow, the story of Yingying and the story of Li Wa.
The author
Lu Xun
1881–1936 · Chinese novelist and essayist
Lu Xun (1881–1936) was a Chinese writer born in Shaoxing. His original name was Zhou Shuren. He wrote fiction, essays, and literary history. A Brief History of Chinese Fiction appeared in 1923–1924, and Wandering in 1926. He lived in Japan and several Chinese cities, and died in Shanghai.
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