| The martial arts novels of Jin Yong, as well as their numerous television and film adaptations, have fascinated Chinese-speaking communities all over the world. These novels, all of which were first serialized in newspapers, were meant for entertainment, yet there exist elements that prevent them from passing quickly to oblivion.; This dissertation examines these elements, including the novelist's portrayals of gender-relationship, heroism, and the notions of happiness and success. It shows how Jin Yong's works draw on Chinese historical, cultural, ideological and literary traditions, as well as sheds light on how the complex network of source and influence and the universal themes of love and adventure have linked those works to European chivalric literature. The male protagonist and the romantic plot are chosen as two points of entry into the investigation of Jin Yong's novels vis-a-vis earlier Chinese texts and Western texts, as they are where similarities and dissimilarities concentrate.; This study is comparative in two aspects. Firstly, it compares Jin Yong's novels with earlier pertinent Chinese works including dynastic chronicles, historical novels, and earlier martial arts novels. Secondly, it has an East-West comparative component, because it employs a variety of Western critical approaches, such as New Historicism and Narratology, to analyze the Chinese texts, and because Jin Yong's novels are compared structurally and thematically with relevant Western texts. Overall, this dissertation features a combination of textual and contextual studies, hence its difference from largely context-oriented and non-comparative scholarship, which has dominated the field of Jin Yong studies.; Among the five chapters of the dissertation, the first one reviews the development of Chinese martial arts fiction, tracing it back to the Historical Records of Sima Qian (145?-89? BC). Chapters two, three and four examine the characterization of the hero and the leitmotif of love in Jin Yong's three representative novels. Specifically, Chapter Two deals with the juxtaposition of wen and wu and the gender relationship in The Book and the Sword, Chapter Three analyzes The Giant Eagle and Its Companion as Bildungsroman and discusses how it articulates a utopian concern intertwined with pastoralism and eremitism. Chapter Four discusses Jin Yong's historicism and use of parody in The Deer and the Cauldron, which pinpoints the intertextuality that underlies the enormous popularity of his martial arts novels. The final chapter compares Jin Yong's works with those of Walter Scott and Alexander Dumas pere, to explore the fundamental similitude between the Chinese concept of xia and Western notion of chivalry. |
