Title: Introduction to Chinese Cultural History / The Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature / 01 Historical Overview

Front: Which short story is the beginning of modern Chinese literature?
Back: In short: the answer is inherently political.
The view that Lu Xun's Diary of a Madman is the "birth" of Chinese modernity in literature is out of date. Chinese literary historians want to rewrite literary history since the 1980s to include more marginalized writers and create a more heterogenous picture of literary development.
Denton says that the division into periods, schools, styles, is political and ideological. Nonetheless, delineating distinct periods is still a useful framework for making sense of the past.
The historical overview in the book starts in the late Qīng, before Lu Xun.