| Chapter : | Introduction |
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Ping Fu’s essay examines Hong Kong film director Wong Kar-wai’s cinematic adaptation of Jin Yong’s fiction. Fu argues that this filmic transformation reveals a political and cultural reconfiguration of jianghu and embodies the filmmaker’s challenge towards the popular genre that Jin Yong’s works represent. As Fu concludes, however, regardless of how many different media attempts are made to transform or even deconstruct Jin Yong’s works, such attempts serve only to underscore the canonical position of Jin Yong’s writing in mass culture.
While The Jin Yong Phenomenon as a whole seeks to expose the dialogical relationship between elite and popular literature, we want to stress, in concluding, that the research collected here has not exhausted all of the possible interconnections. What must be emphasized is the everyday life of popular culture—for it has been the choices of everyday folk that have allowed Jin Yong’s novels to emerge and change the shape of the canonized and hegemonic narratives. Those choices not only activate the popularization of Jin Yong’s novels, but also offer the possibility of producing contestatory modernities. Residing in everyday folk imagination, Jin Yong’s writing challenges us to resist the reflexive urge to pin down a single version of the literary canon without first taking into account the contradictions, tensions, and absences inherent in any narrative of the past or present. His stance makes it possible to re-read many of the canonized narratives, as well as the uncritical assertion of essence that underlines much of the history of modern Chinese literature.
Ann Huss and Jianmei Liu
Hong Kong and Potomac, Maryland