Haosheng's response, for easy viewing and appreciation

Here is my two cents: I do feel Leo Lee’s approach to his study of Lu Xun, to a certain degree, reveals the impact of both Prusek and T.A. Hsia/C.T. Hsia. For example, when dealing with Lu Xun as a truly Chinese modern writer, Lee examined Lu Xun’s “modern” signification by contextualizing Lu Xun’s case in the whole Chinese literary tradition, from classical to modern period, just as Prusek did. By emphasizing how Lu Xun indulged himself in ancient time and classical works during his silent period from 1909 to 1918, Lu Xun’s research on history of classical fiction and on Ji Kang’s selection, and Lu Xun’s practice of classical-style poetry, Lee convincingly argued that people cannot fully and profoundly understand the modern characteristic of Lu Xun without examining his relation to classical literary tradition. Using Prusek’s key word “lyrical”, Lee pointed out that Lu Xun is a truly modern writer not because he appeared as one of the most radical iconoclasts among the May Fourth generation, but because he effectively obtained nutrition from classical tradition as important source of culture re-construction for modern China, sophistically transformed traditional factors into new artistic form in serving the author’s modern emotion, anxiety, and desire, and eventually, successfully created a modern “lyrical poetics” through his writing. Not like T.A. Hsia, who emphasized the complete separation of traditional and modern, and treated traditional culture’s attraction towards Lu Xun as a gate of darkness that Lu Xun had to fight against (p152), Lee found elements in tradition more positive to Lu Xun's intellectual development and literary creation.

T.A. Hsia’s influence can be clearly figured out when Lee probed the dark side of Lu Xun’s “inner self”. Both Hsia and Lee were seeking Lu Xun’s tragic complexity. As Hsia described Lu Xun as an egotist opposed to Partyist, Lee also paid attention to the stereotype of the contrast between particular individual and the mediocrity in Lu Xun’s fictions. Here Lee did not appreciate Prusek’s concept of collective subjectivity as the highest criteria, for him it is nothing else but the intense internal contradiction and anxiety, even the unconquered decadent feeling in Lu Xun’s troubled psyche should take credit for making Lu Xun a distinguished “modernist".
As for T.A. Hsia’s book, I was not surprised to find the author’s anti-communist political stand, but I was surprised to find that Hsia gave Rou Shi’s work a quite bad evaluation, which does not seem fair to me. It seems to me that in Rou Shi’s case, Hsia’s political prejudice misguided his judgment.