Lu Xun and Liang Hong's Depictions of Hometowns in the Context of Reconstructing Rural China
Abstract
Hometown is a core theme in Chinese literature. Over the past century of modernization, China's rural society has gone through two fundamental reconstructions of social order. Lu Xun recorded great rural changes through enlightening fictional novels, while Liang Hong used non‑factual texts to document rural shifts. Lu Xun focused on the collapse of the spiritual order in early‑modern rural China, while Liang Hong looked at the breakdown of the physical rural order in contemporary times. Though coming from the same cultural root, their writings take different paths and together create a literary picture of rural society across a hundred years. Taking rural reconstruction in old and new eras as the main thread, this paper analyzes the spiritual similarities and writing differences in their rural works from four aspects: historical background, character building, narrative style and value position. It compares Lu Xun's criticism of national character and ideological enlightenment shown in his typical characters with the grassroots survival struggles amid urban‑rural transition reflected in Liang Hong's real‑life cases. It explores the spiritual inheritance and changes of century‑old rural literature, and offers a comparative reference for understanding its spiritual system and modern transformation.
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