武侠文学与金庸：关于汉语言文学专业有关毕业设计外文文献翻译.pdf

87 martial-arts fiction and jin yong Wuxia xiaoshuo, here loosely translated as “martial-arts fiction,” more literally means fiction (xiaoshuo) whose subject matter is the intersection of the martial arts (wu) with altruistic ideals and the figure of the “Chinese knight-errant” (xia). Martial-arts fiction refers specifically to extended prose narratives on these themes written in vernacular Chinese during the twentieth century. Histories and “encyclopedias” of martial-arts fiction generally trace the genre’s roots to the classical tales of the Tang dynasty or even the historical records of the Han period (Liu 1967), and martial-arts novels themselves often draw on such texts or cite them as predecessors. There is good reason, nonetheless, to consider martial-arts fiction a uniquely twentieth-century literary genre. The compound wuxia xiaoshuo did not appear in the Chinese vocabulary until the first decade of this century, apparently bor- rowed from the Japanese designation for a genre of contemporary adventure novels. Both the newness of the term and its transmission from the hands of China’s forward-looking neighbor make it a fitting designation for a genre that, whatever its thematic and formal links with an ancient literary tradition, owes its modern form and popularity to the particular conditions of early twentieth- century China. Urbanization, changes in education and social structure, and the growth of commercial publishing all supported martial-arts fiction as one el- ement within the rising medium of mass-distributed entertainment literature; the fundamental nostalgia and nativism of the genre—its setting in a premod- ern rural past, a moment of historical crisis, or a mythic antiquity, and its cele- 510 Martial-Arts Fiction and Jin Yong bration of the martial arts as a uniquely Chinese cultural practice—r