Lu Xun And Sherwood Anderson: The Great Pathfinders Of Modern Literature

This paper mainly explores the similarities between Lu Xun and Sherwood Anderson's creative contributions to modern literature. They start a new literary era in their respective countries almost simultaneously, and exert profound influence toward the following generations: Anderson, the modernism era in America; Lu Xun, modern Chinese literature. They two have at least three comparabilities: modernity, theme, and writing techniques. Both Lu Xun and Sherwood Anderson have been deeply influenced by modernist philosophers and thinkers such as F. Nietzsche, Darwin, Freud, Bergson etc. Thus, they have clear traces of modernist thoughts. Lu Xun and Anderson create the same provincial literary themes and grotesque character images. They both attach great importance to the places they have inhabited and the people they have been familiar with. They have the sense of crisis and tragedy and also the observant insight toward the society, which make their works immortal. Lu Xun and Sherwood Anderson are very sensitive to writing techniques, adopting and creating many modernist writing techniques such as, symbolism, psychoanalysis, stream of consciousness, grotesqueness and expressionism, colloquial and prose style, the first person narration etc. The writing techniques are the specific embodiment of their modernist thoughts. Besides, their position in literature and influence toward the following generations are quite similar. From the cultural and social backgrounds, they also resemble in some sense.Like anything else, they differ in many ways. The biggest difference is as follows: Lu Xun is a typical realist master, advocating "for humanity" and bearing strong revolutionary sense. He takes in excellent cultural achievements, home and abroad, ancient and modern, to serve his own works with the attitude of "take-overtime". It is especially obvious that Lu Xun takes in western modernist thoughts and writing techniques. It is from this angle that there is the comparability between Lu Xun and Sherwood Anderson. But Anderson is a pure and typical modernist writer with little realist factors. He is the forerunner of American modernist literature especially of the psychoanalysis and stream of consciousness literature.After all, they live in different cultures, traditions, social and historical reality and had different missions. And the differences and their causes, social, cultural and historical are also mentioned in the thesis.