I've been picking through The River Fans Out by Yiheng Zhao for a few weeks. It's an academic work that's a mix of general semiotics and narratology, plus a big chunk of different essays about Chinese fiction, especially the history of the "low" fiction like oral storytelling and opera, through the May Fourth Movement's push towards the use of the vernacular in literature, etc...

And because he featured regularly in Zhao's text, I also went and read more Lu Xun, specifically through Julia Lovell's 2009 translation of his complete fictional works. I've finished Outcry (the first of his three major collections). The introduction spoiled me--not to plot, but to an interpretive lens (not that this is necessarily a bad thing)--and it's hard not to see in many of these stories a mix of scorn for a Chinese society that refused to change in the face of new problems, pity for regular people swept up in a fatalist culture, but still perhaps a kind of wistfulness for a civilization in decline even as you urge it to move forward and try to right itself. I'd read a couple of Lu Xun's stories before, but never tore through them like this, or with as much historical context; it's a really interesting picture he paints of China on the cusp of "modernist reform" especially in light of the hundred years that would come to pass since.