Law, ideology, and popular culture: A study of traditional crime fiction in late Imperial China and Choso˘n Korea

This study is intended to show the complex relations of popular culture with ideology as manifested in the genre of traditional crime fiction ( gong'an) in late imperial China and Chosoˇn Korea. The main text analyzed in this study is the Judge Bao story collection published during the late Ming, which contained one hundred court case stories featuring Judge Bao. This particular crime story collection directs our attention toward popular culture and the reading practice of popular fiction in late imperial China in that this book was a product of commercial printing, aimed at popular audiences.; In this study, thus, the main focus is not just on the textual and historical analysis of one text or one genre, but rather on the active intercommunication between this crime story collection and other literary genres, traditions, and cultures. Popular texts of this kind are more often than not misunderstood as the uniform expression of a single ideology. However, this study clearly illustrates that gong'an also known as Chinese court case fiction in English is best understood as a popular text replete with ideological contradictions, divergences, and ambiguities. Through this study, we see that popular culture in traditional Confucian society was not just the reflection of either the interests of the dominant class or the expression of popular consciousness, but rather a site of constant ideological conflicts between the two.; Furthermore, gong'an fiction is likely to serve as a good example for a comparative study of popular fiction and its reading practice in traditional Confucian society. More specifically, the Judge Bao story collection was transmitted to ChosOn Korea in the early seventeenth century, and afterwards translated into vernacular Korean, by and large for women audiences. The Korean rendition of the Judge Bao story collection deserves our particular attention in that it sheds light on the relationship between traditional crime fiction and women's culture. This study demonstrates that the representation of Confucian ideology in traditional fiction is greatly diverse, multiform, and even contradictory.