Jin Yong’s Martial Arts Fiction and the Kungfu Industrial Complex

Jin Yong’s Martial Arts Fiction and the Kungfu Industrial Complex
Author: Paul B. Foster
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2023-02-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1666921483

Jin Yong’s Martial Arts Fiction and the Kungfu Industrial Complex is an analysis of the role of Jin Yong’s stories and characters in the construction of the “kungfu industrial complex”—a complicated, multi-dimensional cultural/business matrix related to the production and consumption of martial arts fiction, film, and legacy. The author first explicates the “kungfu cultural literacy” that makes Jin Yong’s characters and stories intelligible and compelling to a wide audience and then argues that academic resistance to integrating his pop fiction into the canon of Chinese literature is overcome via the national character discourse. The author subsequently explores the role of actors, directors, and crews as they repeatedly adapted the novels for film and television and provided afterlives for Jin Yong’s characters, stories, and tropes, both kicking off actors’ careers and driving the globalization of kungfu action. Archetypical characters, multidimensional production and consumption of cultural capital and star power meet in a final analysis of the “Kung Fu Hustle Hustle,” which balances critical reality and a hopeful vision for China’s future.

Jin Yong's Martial Arts Fiction and the Kungfu Industrial Complex

Jin Yong's Martial Arts Fiction and the Kungfu Industrial Complex
Author: Paul B. Foster
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2024-11-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9781666921496

Jin Yong's Martial Arts Fiction and the Kungfu Industrial Complex is an analysis of the role of Jin Yong's stories and characters in the construction of the "kungfu industrial complex"--a complicated, multi-dimensional cultural/business matrix related to the production and consumption of martial arts fiction, film, and legacy. The author first explicates the "kungfu cultural literacy" that makes Jin Yong's characters and stories intelligible and compelling to a wide audience and then argues that academic resistance to integrating his pop fiction into the canon of Chinese literature is overcome via the national character discourse. The author subsequently explores the role of actors, directors, and crews as they repeatedly adapted the novels for film and television and provided afterlives for Jin Yong's characters, stories, and tropes, both kicking off actors' careers and driving the globalization of kungfu action. Archetypical characters, multidimensional production and consumption of cultural capital and star power meet in a final analysis of the "Kung Fu Hustle Hustle," which balances critical reality and a hopeful vision for China's future.

Routledge Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature

Routledge Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature
Author: Ming Dong Gu
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 902
Release: 2018-09-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317236696

The Routledge Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature presents a comprehensive overview of Chinese literature from the 1910s to the present day. Featuring detailed studies of selected masterpieces, it adopts a thematic-comparative approach. By developing an innovative conceptual framework predicated on a new theory of periodization, it thus situates Chinese literature in the context of world literature, and the forces of globalization. Each section consists of a series of contributions examining the major literary genres, including fiction, poetry, essay drama and film. Offering an exciting account of the century-long process of literary modernization in China, the handbook’s themes include: Modernization of people and writing Realism, rmanticism and mdernist asthetics Chinese literature on the stage and screen Patriotism, war and revolution Feminism, liberalism and socialism Literature of reform, reflection and experimentation Literature of Taiwan, Hong Kong and new media This handbook provides an integration of biographical narrative with textual analysis, maintaining a subtle balance between comprehensive overview and in-depth examination. As such, it is an essential reference guide for all students and scholars of Chinese literature.

Remixing Wong Kar-wai

Remixing Wong Kar-wai
Author: Giorgio Biancorosso
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 153
Release: 2024-11-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1478060166

Like his fellow filmmakers Stanley Kubrick, Quentin Tarantino, and Sofia Coppola, Wong Kar-wai crafts the soundtracks of his films by jettisoning original scores in favor of commercial recordings. In Remixing Wong Kar-wai, Giorgio Biancorosso examines the combinatorial practice at the heart of Wong’s cinema to retheorize musical borrowing, appropriation, and repurposing. Wong’s irrepressible penchant for poaching music from other films—whether old Chinese melodramas, Hollywood blockbusters, or European art films—subsumes familiar music under his own brand of cinema. As Wong combs through musical and cinematic archives and splices disparate music together, exceedingly well-known music loses its previous associations and acquires an infinite new constellation of meanings in his films. Drawing on Claude Lévi-Strauss’s concept of bricolage, Biancorosso contends that Wong’s borrowing is akin to a practice of creative destruction in which Wong becomes a bricoleur who remixes music at hand to create new and complete, self-sustaining statements. By outlining Wong’s modus operandi of indiscriminate borrowing and remixing, Biancorosso prompts readers to reconsider the significance of transforming preexisting music into new compositions for film and beyond.

Hong Kong Connections

Hong Kong Connections
Author: Meaghan Morris
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2005-10-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1932643192

Since the 1960s, Hong Kong cinema has helped to shape one of the world's most popular cultural genres: action cinema. Hong Kong action films have proved popular over the decades with audiences worldwide, and they have seized the imaginations of filmmakers working in many different cultural traditions and styles. How do we account for this appeal, which changes as it crosses national borders? Hong Kong Connections brings leading film scholars together to explore the uptake of Hong Kong cinema in Japan, Korea, India, Australia, France and the US as well as its links with Taiwan, Singapore and the Chinese mainland. In the process, this collective study examines diverse cultural contexts for action cinema's popularity, and the problems involved in the transnational study of globally popular forms suggesting that in order to grasp the history of Hong Kong action cinema's influence we need to bring out the differences as well as the links that constitute popularity.

Imagining Sisterhood in Modern Chinese Texts, 1890–1937

Imagining Sisterhood in Modern Chinese Texts, 1890–1937
Author: Yun Zhu
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2017-03-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1498536301

This book investigates sisterhood as a converging thread that wove female subjectivities and intersubjectivities into a larger narrative of Chinese modernity embedded in a newly conceived global context. It focuses on the period between the late Qing reform era around the turn of the twentieth century and the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, which saw the emergence of new ways of depicting Chinese womanhood in various kinds of media. In a critical hermeneutic approach, Zhu combines an examination of an outside perspective (how narratives and images about sisterhood were mobilized to shape new identities and imaginations) with that of an inside perspective (how subjects saw themselves as embedded in or affected by the discourse and how they negotiated such experiences within texts or through writing). With its working definition of sisterhood covering biological as well as all kinds of symbolic and metaphysical connotations, this book exams the literary and cultural representations of this elastic notion with attention to, on the one hand, a supposedly collective identity shared by all modern Chinese female subjects and, on the other hand, the contesting modes of womanhood that were introduced through the juxtaposition of divergent “sisters.” Through an interdisciplinary approach that brings together historical materials, literary and cultural analysis, and theoretical questions, Zhu conducts a careful examination of how new identities, subjectivities and sentiments were negotiated and mediated through the hermeneutic circuits around “sisterhood.”

Ma Yuan

Ma Yuan
Author: Will Gatherer
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2021
Genre: Post-postmodernism (Literature)
ISBN: 9781793609038

"Ma Yuan: The Chinese Avant-Garde, Metafiction, and Post-Postmodernism in the works of Ma Yuan provides the most comprehensive study to date on one of China's most influential contemporary authors, Ma Yuan. By engaging in close readings of narratologically complex works of metafiction, the author offers a reappraisal of the role Ma Yuan played within the rise of postmodern fiction within China and offers new interpretive possibilities for the Chinese Avant-Garde movement of the 1980s through demonstrating that rather than being predominantly 'formalist word games' or 'narrative traps', Ma Yuan's works of metafiction functioned as Foucauldian 'heterotopias' which allowed for the creation of distinctly Post-modern and Post-socialist 'possible worlds'. This book also analyses Ma Yuan's recent post-2000 output and in doing so explores the shifting dynamics of literary self-reflexivity and the 'Post-postmodern' within the contemporary context of 'Xi Jinping era modernity'. This book argues that Ma Yuan's recent works display a distinct movement towards 'metamodern' aesthetics alongside a rising anthropocenic awareness and eco-consciousness which offer key insights into the post-postmodern condition within a Chinese context"--

Classical Chinese Poetry in Singapore

Classical Chinese Poetry in Singapore
Author: Bing Wang
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 203
Release: 2017-11-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 149853516X

As the essence of Chinese traditional culture, classical Chinese poetry in Singapore played a very important role in the social and cultural development of Singapore’s Chinese community. Numerous poems depicted the unique scenery of tropical rainforest and the customs with a Nanyang flavor, recorded the various historical events from the colonial era, the World War II to the independent nation, and reflected the poets’ multiple feelings. This book sketches out the brief history of classical Chinese poetry in Singapore over a hundred years, and focuses on the complex identity of poets from different generations, the function of literary societies in the construction of cultural space and the influence of modern media on the development of classical Chinese poetry based on the text interpretation. In addition, the author attempts to define different types of poetry writing using diaspora literature and Sinophone literature. The discussion of these topics will not only expand the research horizon of Chinese literature, but also provide a meaningful reference to the studies of the worldwide Chinese overseas, especially in Southeast Asia.

The Hong Kong Modernism of Leung Ping-kwan

The Hong Kong Modernism of Leung Ping-kwan
Author: C. T. Au
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2019-11-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1793609381

This book resolves around the fundamental question, “What is Hong Kong modernism?” To address this issue, C.T. Au identifies three significant characteristics: a renewal of traditions, an obsession with ordinary things, and an expression of concerns about social and political issues, shared among Western modernisms, Chinese modernism in the 1940s, and such Hong Kong modernists as Ma Lang, Liu Yichang, and Leung Ping-kwan (Yasi/Ye Si). This research concentrates on an examination of the major modernist tenets embodied in Leung’s literary works. Leung Ping-kwan is one of the most prominent and widely read Hong Kong modernist writers; however, there exist only a few scholarly works which focus on the direct relationship between Leung’s works and modernisms. The author argues that Leung paid special attention to issues regarding tradition, daily life, and colonial culture in order to understand his past, his identity, and the unique features of Hong Kong modernism, which celebrate multiple perspectives and inclusiveness. This study not only helps differentiate Hong Kong modernism from other modernisms—positioning the former as a variant of the latter—but also provides a response to the problems evoked by Hong Kong’s colonial milieu.

A Study of Literary Trends in China Since the 1980s

A Study of Literary Trends in China Since the 1980s
Author: Teresa Chi-Ching Sun
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 87
Release: 2019-03-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0761871098

This book intends to trace the revival of traditional literary works since the 1980s in China as it is revealed on the revitalized College Entrance Examination (CEE). In order to show how these changes reflect China’s altering ideology after the fall of Communism, selections from the CEE’s literary portion will be examined. Taking advantage of the resurrection of the powerful CEE, test creators have composed the literary portion as an education tool to shape public opinion in the post-Communist era. Literature in China have never been an independent art but had shared the responsibility for transmitting China’s intellectual and ethical traditions. The introduction of Communism to China silenced these traditions and made literature the servant of political ideology. This book traces the chronological process of restoring modern vernacular literature from the pre-Communist era and the ways in which traditional literature is being used for modern purposes. For many Chinese intellectuals, the gradual withdrawal of literature for serving political causes and the reinstatement of classical literature and early vernacular works to on the CEE bring to light the recovery of the aesthetic literary tradition and a return to normalcy. When students take the CEE, they not only mentally scrutinize literature that they first read during their secondary education, but also experience an assertive presentation of current Chinese cultural values and outlooks on life. This study argues that in the post-1980s CEE literary selections, students experience a variety of texts that summon up China’s pre-Communist literary tradition in order to serve as an intellectual guiding light for future social development. For those interested in comparative higher education, a particular area of interest may be the book’s singular consideration of the science and technology passages in connection with the restructuring of higher education in China as a remedy of China’s cultural tradition.