Wang Dulu was born into a poor Manchu Banner family in Beijing as Wang Baoxiang , his style Xiaoyu . He tried several jobs: editor for a small newspaper, clerk for a merchant association, and writer. He lived through the New Culture Movement and the May Fourth Cultural Revolution, and began writing novels during the 1930s. His early work was mostly detective novels. He switched to writing Wuxia novels after he moved to . In the eleven years from 1938 until 1949 he wrote 16 martial arts novels. In 1949, when the People's Liberation Army won the Chinese Civil War he stopped writing and became a school teacher. During the Cultural Revolution, like many other Chinese intellectuals, he was forced from his job and sentenced to farm labor. In 1975, towards the end of the Cultural Revolution, he was able to live with his son but died from an illness just two years later. He had written a total of 30 novels. He was married and had at least three children. His widow, Li Danquan, was still alive and able to meet with Ang Lee during the filming of the ''Crouching Tiger'' movie in 1999.
Wang Dulu is most famous for his wuxia-romance tragic novels and social romance novels . He is considered by many to be one of founders of the modern genre of wuxia, and within that genre he has secured a place as one of the "Ten Great Authors" and one of the "Four Great Authors of the Northern School" along with Li Shoumin, Gong Baiyu, and Zheng Zhengyin. Zhang Gansheng, a Mainland scholar of modern and contemporary Chinese popular literature, has characterized him as perfecting the wuxia form, and opening the way for a generation of great masters; but according to Xu Sinian, another scholar of Chinese popular novels, there has not been any detailed critique of Wang's works, aside from that of the Taiwanese scholar Ye Hongsheng.
The Crane-Iron Series
Wang is remembered today mostly for his five-part epic wuxia-romance series, often called collectively the "Crane-Iron Series" , named so for the first characters in the titles of the first and last entries in the series. These books chronicle the struggles of four generations of xia men and women. These are the titles under which they are now published, in order of their internal chronology :
# ''Crane Frightens Kunlun''
# ''Precious Sword, Golden Hairpin''
# ''Sword's Force, Pearl's Shine''
# ''''
# ''Iron Knight, Silver Vase''
The first book of the series, ''Crane Startles Kunlun'', was written third, after ''Sword Spirit, Pearl Light'', and serialized under the name ''Dancing Crane, Singing Luan'' .
Ang Lee's version of the movie actually includes episodes and information from some of the other books in the series aside from ''Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon''.
As of 2007, no official English language translations of his novels exist. However, there is a manhua series created by Andy Seto. They depart substantially from the written text.
Other sources
*
*
No comments:
Post a Comment