Comparison Between James Joyce's And Lu Xun's Short Stories

Lu Xun was an important writer in the May 4th Movement and the New Culture Movement in modern Chinese history and exerted great influence on Modern Chinese Literature. Chairman Mao used to say:"Lu Xun in China, in my opinion, is the first class saint. Confucius is a saint in feudal society, while Lu Xun is the one in modern society". And in 1940 he used "three great" and "six the most" to appreciate the great value of Lu Xun, he said:"Lu Xun was the greatest and bravest standard-bearer of this new cultural army, as a commander of the Cultural Revolution. Lu Xun was not only a great writer but a great thinker and revolutionary as well. Lu Xun is a man who has the strongest mental spirit and is never defeated by any pressure, and that is the most precious character of man in a semi-colony and semi-feudal society. Lu Xun represents most of the national heroes who fight to the enemies in the most correct, the bravest, the most determined, the most loyal, and the most enthusiastic way. The direction of Lu Xun is the direction of Chinese culture". The reason why Lu Xun is being appraised in such a high way is that the theme of his works aims to change the soul of the nation, and he always explores the inner world of mankind and put the promotion of the mental condition of Chinese as his goal. Thus Lu Xun occupies an important position in Chinese Literature.As one of the founders of Modernism, James Joyce is a writer who is full of controversy. His works Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1936) were criticized by contemporaries from the date of their publishing. And his representative Ulysses (1922) was even called an "unreadable book" because of its obscure language and massive use of allusions. Despite of this, there is no denying that his talent of writing and the profound thoughts of living were revealed by his works, and the style of his writing is also creative. That makes him one of the representative writers in the 20th century. Dubliners is one of Joyce's early works, and the only collection of short stories. Joyce took Dublin as a person, described its whole life through four stages that are the childhood, adolescence, adult and the stage till the end of its life. He said:"If Dublin were ever to be destroyed, it could be rebuilt from the pages of my works". There is very little architectural detail of the city in Joyce's writing. He was more interested in the lives of Dublin's citizens than the buildings which housed them. It was the moral and psychological landscape of the city that fascinated him.In this paper, the author makes a comparison between the two writers from the perspective of Parallel Study in Comparative Literature. Lu Xun's Call to Arms and Wandering and James Joyce's Dubliners are collection of short stories, there exist lots of similarities, such as the author's background, the social background of the short stories, the creative purpose of the writers, the theme of the works, characters, national characteristic and so on. This paper takes the texts of the short stories as the basis, and by using the theory of Parallel Study in Comparative Literature to make a comparison major in the themes and the characters to make up the shortage which compares broadly but not deeply in former researches. This paper is divided into five chapters. Besides the chapter one, a brief introduction, and the last chapter, a conclusion, it mainly discusses the theme in three parts:the first parts is an literature review which summarizes the major researches in this area; the second part is the methodology which is Parallel Study in Comparative literature this paper uses in analysis; the third part is the comparison of similarities between James Joyce and Lu Xun, majoring in the aspect of writer's background, themes and characters.