A Brief History of Studies on Image Pedigree of Figures in Lu Xun’s Essays: A Continuous Answering to “Qu Qiubai’s Question”

Qu Qiubai’s “Preface to Selections of Lu Xun’s Essays” highly approve and deeply expound Lu Xun’s thought in his essays, and it is undoubted to be the foundation of the studies on Lu Xun’s essays. As for the “art form” of Lu Xun’s essays, Qu believes that all the figures criticized and even the animals depicted in Lu’s essays could be seen as “given type in society” and “general nouns”, while Qu considers that Lu’s essays are not enough to sufficiently cast “concrete images and types”, and, therefore, are “not enough to substitute for creative writing”. Such a contradicted expounding is in fact proposing a fundamental “Qu Qiubai’s question” for the studies of essays. The hitherto history of studies on Lu Xun has demonstrated that it is necessary to comprehensively and concretely put in order the “figure images” which are “depicted” in Lu Xun’s essays, and to reveal an image pedigree of the seemingly-scattered “figure images”, so as to confirm theoretically what Lu Xun in his essays “depicted often a nose, a mouth, and hair, but in whole almost a complete image”, and in this way to convincingly answer the unsolved “Qu Qiubai’s question” in the past 90 years.