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This paper examines the tension between personal and collective ambition in martial arts novels by Jin Yong and their later adaptations across different media. In Jin Yong’s original works, the social space known as jianghu 江湖 functions as a site of individual and collective training and ambition, reifying the protagonist’s public existence and ambition. It is a complex space where conventional contrasts between “good” 正 and “evil” 邪 can be critiqued by the martial heroes’ private attempts to transcend ideological strictures. As such, the jianghu space clearly manifests the complexity of Chinese literary modernity that this panel sets out to explore.
The public trajectory of Jin Yong’s heroes is further complicated as they are written into movies, television series, and other contemporary cultural products, transcending Jin Yong’s creative input to function as cultural touchstones, as they are drawn into new stories. Heroes Ouyang Feng and Huang Yaoshi transcend Jin Yong’s depiction in Tsui Hark’s enigmatic film, Ashes of Time, virtually setting forth a postmodern definition of jianghu. Yang Guo and Xiao Longnu re-emerge in cultural discourse after many years of retirement via Stephen Chow’s movie, Kungfu Hustle. And Linghu Chong, who straddles the divide of good and evil, sees his famous retirement from the jianghu morph into a popular television comedy variety show.
Postmodern interpretive dystopia challenges Jin Yong’s public themes of social and political allegory and suggests a lean toward the private, resulting in increased interpretative space for reimagining the individual within the public discourse.