The Jin Yong Phenomenon: Chinese Martial Arts Fiction and Modern Chinese Literary History Paperback – 10 Jan. 2023

Jin Yong (or Louis Cha) is quite famous in China but literally unknown outside of China. However, Jin Yong has had an impressive impact on almost every person on the planet, through the medium of the Hong Kong martial arts movie. Jin Yong (among a small handful of other writers) were responsible for the popularization of the wuxia genre (most classically known through the novel Water Margin), which was the source of one of Hong Kong's key exports during the latter half of the twentieth century, but more importantly, which sparked a literary revolution in China that is still spinning wheels of change today.Wuxia, as a genre, was an early attempt as mixing popular sensibility with the elegance and sometimes distant writing style employed by classical writers (but hated by modernists). This book contains an impressive amount of literary criticism of the genre. This book, however, is not an introduction to the genre, nor is it unbiased. The writers clearly espouse the enormity and value that wuxia brought to literary studies, and most of the writers are Chinese. Nevertheless, the book provides an excellent starting ground for literary discourse and future scholarship.