ABSTRACT
Widely recognized as Taiwan’s most celebrated martial arts novelist, Gu Long and his works have drawn much critical attention. Critics agree on Gu Long’s contribution to revitalizing martial arts fiction, and yet disagree with how to account for his narrative innovation. This chapter places Gu Long’s martial arts fiction at the juncture of multidirectional cultural feedback loops between Taiwan and the globe in the 1950s and 1970s. The chapter examines how an array of forces, both internal and external, and political and aesthetical, generated challenges to Taiwanese martial arts novelists and how Gu Long reflected upon them, responded to criticisms and changing market demand, and eventually developed his distinctive style. It argues that Gu Long’s idiosyncratic creation was an outcome of a decades-long negotiation and self-positioning with complex factors, including previous genre conventions, his publishing experiences in Hong Kong, and world literature.
