Description
Book SynopsisIn the post-war mid-century Robert van Gulik produced a series of stories set in Imperial China and featuring a Chinese Judge: Judge Dee. This book examines the author’s unprecedented effort in hybridising two heterogenous crime writing traditions – traditional Chinese gong’an (court-case) fiction and its Anglo-American counterpart – bringing to light how his fiction draws elements from these two traditions for plots, narrative features, visual images, and gender representation. Relying on research on various sources and literary traditions, it provides illumination of the historical contexts, centring on the cultural interaction and connectedness that occurred during the multidirectional global flows of the Judge Dee texts in both western and Chinese markets. This study contributes to current scholarship on crime fiction by questioning its predominantly Eurocentric focus and the divisive post-colonial approach often adopted in accessing works concerning foreign peoples and cultures.
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Table of ContentsAcknowledgements List of Figures Introduction 1 Anglophone Crime Fiction and Diversified Ethnicity 2 Global Crime Fiction 3 Orientalism, Hybridity, and Globalisation 1 A Man of Three Lives: Life, Scholarship and Judge Dee Fiction 1 Sources of Biographical Information 2 Early Years and Education 3 Diplomatic Career 4 A Man of Letters and Scholarship 5 Judge Dee as Biographical Writing: Diplomacy, Scholarship, and Fiction 2 Gong’an Literature: A Literary Tradition 1 Gong’an Literature in the Song and Yuan Dynasties (960–1368) 2 Gong’an in the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) 3 Gong’an in the Qing Dynasty (1644–1912) 4 Narrative Pattern: Story Recycling 3 Globalising Judge Dee: Halved Translation and Hybridised Narrative 1 Van Gulik’s Adaptation: Translation and Creation 4 The Globalised Judge Dee: Hybridised Representation of Gender and Sexuality 1 Gendering Crime Fiction: The Classic and the Hard-Boiled 2 Representing the Male: Hybridised Detective Hero and Authorial Identification 3 Representing the Female: Hybridised Eroticism 4 The Combined Male Gaze: Scopophilic, Voyeuristic, and Sadistic 5 Localising the Global: Judge Dee Returns Home and the Chinese Translations 1 Introducing Western Detective Fiction: The First Tidal Wave 2 Translating Western Detective Fiction: The Second Tidal Wave and the Translation of Van Gulik’s Judge Dee Series 3 Localised Rewriting: The Influence of Ideologies 4 Localised Rewriting: The Dominant and the Personalised Poetics Conclusion Bibliography Index
