The scholar John C. Y. Wang finds the study is still "significant and enduring" in providing a strong interpretive framework and detailed presentations of many previously neglected works, but also that it has obvious shortcomings, such as overemphasis on early forms of fiction, not enough coverage of later forms, such as the bianwen and vernacular short stories.

A draft version based on his lecture notes was issued in two parts in 1923 and 1924, then in a combined volume in 1925, which was reprinted five times.

Two dominant genres of the Tang, the bianwen and pinghua, he continues, had only begun to be rediscovered and few readers understood their historical significance.

Hegel concludes that Lu Xun's critical insights into individual works remain useful, but Brief History, "while still thought-provoking, is far from sufficient as an introduction to the field now, seventy years later.

The solid scholarship is all the more impressive because earlier neglect of the subject made it difficult to establish authorship, text, and dating.

For instance, Professor Gu Ming Dong writes that a "scholarly consensus" at the time holds that Chinese fiction reached “full maturity” only in the Tang dynasty, for "Lu Xun’s view has been generally considered authoritative."

The argument in Brief History is that the pre-Tang stories were "unconsciously composed fictional works" (fei youyi zuo xiaoshuo) while the Tang chuanqi tales were "consciously composed fiction" (youyi wei xiaoshuo).

[5] Gu points out that Lu Xun's distinction grew from one made by Hu Yinglin, a literary theorist in the Qing dynasty, who stressed "authorial intention".

He goes on to take Lu Xun to task for underestimating pre-Tang fiction writers who recognized the need for factuality but wanted to take advantage of their powers of fictitious creativity.

Wilt Idema, for instance, was among the first to disagree with Lu Xun's explanation that the huaben of the Song dynasty were "promptbooks," or at least printed versions of them, used by professional storytellers, (Brief History Ch 12–13) rather than stories which consciously adopt the conventions and rhetoric of storytellers in order to achieve certain effects.

[7] Later scholars adopted Lu Xun's term shenmo xiaoshuo (神魔小说) in Brief History, which has three chapters on the genre.

Novels of Exposure at the End of the Ching Dynasty Postscript Appendices: The Historical Development of Chinese Fiction