Zhang Jinglu e la prima, dimenticata, storia della narrativa cinese

For many years it was believed that the earliest history of Chinese fiction was Zhongguo xiaoshuo shilüe 中国小说史略 (A Brief History of Chinese Fiction), written by Lu Xun 鲁迅 and published in 1923. Actually, Lu Xun’s work was preceded by Zhongguo xiaoshuo shi dagang 中国小说史大纲 (An outline of Chinese Fiction) published in 1920 by Zhang Jinglu 张静庐. This essay tries to analyse Zhang Jinglu’s work. He was a very active intellectual and editor during the literary reform, therefore he had a very wide knowledge of the Chinese literary landscape and the main Western literary movements. The story that he wrote, despite its brevity, analyses the birth, the evolution and the development of Chinese fiction, even describing, in its final pages, the processes of assimilation towards foreign literary genres that took place at the turn of the Nineteenth century in China.