The True Story Of Ah Q
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Edition: 5th ed.,
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
One of the most celebrated and enduring works of modern Chinese literature, The True Story of Ah Q chronicles the tragicomic misadventures of Ah Q, a poor, itinerant laborer living in rural China during the twilight years of the Qing Dynasty and the tumultuous dawn of the 1911 Republican Revolution. Masterfully satirical in tone, the novella presents its hapless protagonist as a man perpetually defeated by circumstance yet psychologically incapable of acknowledging failure — a mechanism Lu Hsun famously termed spiritual victory, wherein Ah Q reframes every humiliation as a private triumph. Beyond its surface-level comedy, the work stands as a searing indictment of the intellectual and moral paralysis Lu Hsun perceived within Chinese society at large, arguing that self-deception and blind conservatism were the true enemies of national progress. Written in 1921 and serialised in a Beijing newspaper, it remains a cornerstone of 20th-century world literature, lauded for its razor-sharp irony, economy of prose, and the author's unflinching willingness to hold a mirror up to an entire civilisation. The question The True Story of Ah Q ultimately poses — whether a society can ever truly reform itself without first confronting its own illusions — resonates as powerfully today as it did a century ago.
Author: Lu Hsun
Format: Paperback
Published: 1972, Foreign Languages Press, Peking
Genre: Classic fiction
Edition: 5th ed.,
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
One of the most celebrated and enduring works of modern Chinese literature, The True Story of Ah Q chronicles the tragicomic misadventures of Ah Q, a poor, itinerant laborer living in rural China during the twilight years of the Qing Dynasty and the tumultuous dawn of the 1911 Republican Revolution. Masterfully satirical in tone, the novella presents its hapless protagonist as a man perpetually defeated by circumstance yet psychologically incapable of acknowledging failure — a mechanism Lu Hsun famously termed spiritual victory, wherein Ah Q reframes every humiliation as a private triumph. Beyond its surface-level comedy, the work stands as a searing indictment of the intellectual and moral paralysis Lu Hsun perceived within Chinese society at large, arguing that self-deception and blind conservatism were the true enemies of national progress. Written in 1921 and serialised in a Beijing newspaper, it remains a cornerstone of 20th-century world literature, lauded for its razor-sharp irony, economy of prose, and the author's unflinching willingness to hold a mirror up to an entire civilisation. The question The True Story of Ah Q ultimately poses — whether a society can ever truly reform itself without first confronting its own illusions — resonates as powerfully today as it did a century ago.