Iris Ma Talk: Fictionality, Historicity, and the Conception of “Literature” in Modern China, 1920s-1940s

The University of Texas at Austin presents a talk by Iris Ma.

PhD Candidate, UCLA Asian Language & Culture Department & Visiting Research Fellow, UT-Austin Asian Studies Department

China has a long tradition of historiographical writing. In the world of Chinese letters, boundaries between history and literature, reality and fantasy had long been unclear. Narrative prose, in particular, was perceived as the reproduction of reality, and its authors as the “narrators” of actual historical events. While some novel commentators and scholars in the sixteenth and seventeenth century discussed the question of fictionality, most readers still perceived literature as an articulation of history. The reaction to the publication of Xiang Kairan’s 向愷然 (1889-1957) martial arts novel The Biographies of Marvelous Knights-errant in the Jianghu 江湖奇俠傳 (1923-27), and its subsequent adaptation into film (1928-31), underscored the persistent confusion between literature and history in early twentieth-century China. At the time, newspapers reported that after reading the novel students dropped out of school and fled to the mountains in search of masters of martial arts and magic.   

This talk uses the evaluation of martial arts fiction in China to explore the notion of “fictionality,” its interplay with historicity, and the formation of the modern “literature” concept. First, it introduces the well-known modern Chinese martial arts writer Xiang Kairan and his writing style, publication history, and personal experiences. It demonstrates how Xiang’s literary invention, real-life activities, and the traditional way of reading literature combined to create a “myth” that catalyzed the 1920s martial arts craze. In the decades that followed, Chinese writers used fictional parodies of Xiang’s work to mock this literary sub-genre; while left-wing intellectuals publicly criticized it. Gond Baiyu 宮白羽 (1899-1966), a successful martial arts writer in northern China, explicitly called for educating readers about the fictionality of fiction in late 1930s and early 1940s, that is, actively teaching the populace how to distinguish between “literature” and reality. The evolution of Chinese martial arts fiction, I argue, epitomizes the emergence and popular conceptions of modern Chinese “literature.”