In light of this, the observer is short changed of the opportunity to see the tree within the forest. Put simply, many a scholar have argued that if Kung fu is just cheap popular entertainment, why bother? If, however, the critic or professor does not dismiss the Kung fu tradition, but tries instead to fit the pieces of the puzzle together, a surprisingly rich ensemble of histories, ancient and modern, that explains the phenomenal rise of the martial arts might emerge. This is what the editors and writers of this volume have done—each entry is a piece in the puzzle, a tree that fits into the larger forest that is the martial arts tradition.
The editors’ first great service is to bring the tree back to the forest. In this volume, Jin Yong is not simply presented in contrast to the media image of Kung fu. Through the study of Jin Yongs work, the reader also becomes privy to the evolution of the martial arts tradition. Moreover, the martial arts are also situated within the multilayered traditions of Chinese literature and social life, revealing its interplay and exchange with other literary forms within a larger cultural environment. More significantly, the contributors portray the martial arts tradition with an eye to the changing political landscape from the 1950s to the present in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and other Chinese communities around the world.
The reader may be surprised to find that in the traditional or modern literary establishment, martial arts fiction was not always respected. One task of this book is to challenge the May Fourth view of the martial arts genre and its constituents. May Fourth culture embraced modern, Western ideas, values, and literary forms, and discounted the martial arts form as obsolete, backward, and antimodern. From this literary lineage, Jin Yong’s work arose as a challenge to this lopsided view that China could only become modern by discarding traditional culture. This tension between the traditional and modern provoked a debate over the very texture and syntax of language. May Fourth writers preferred to shed their traditional vocabulary in favor of a Europeanized language, as if changing one’s linguistic garb would serve as a mode of liberation. Jin Yong’s writing, indebted to an entrenched yet submerged mélange of storytelling, classical essays, vernacular stories, and chivalric novels, has recreated a literary language that looks both familiar and strange.