While studies of one of the forms of Hong Kong popular literature, martial arts fiction, have successfully entered the academic field both locally and internationally, another form, romance fiction, has received little attention. Romance is an important and influential genre of popular literature that flourished in Hong Kong in the 1950s, the period in which martial arts novels thrived, but it has never been seriously and systematically studied. This dissertation explores the rich variety of Hong Kong romances produced in the 1950s and their social and cultural implications. It argues that these romances are far from being formulaic and thus cannot be homogenized; they carry their own distinct aesthetics as well as the specific social and cultural imprint of the time. This study...[ Read more ]

While studies of one of the forms of Hong Kong popular literature, martial arts fiction, have successfully entered the academic field both locally and internationally, another form, romance fiction, has received little attention. Romance is an important and influential genre of popular literature that flourished in Hong Kong in the 1950s, the period in which martial arts novels thrived, but it has never been seriously and systematically studied. This dissertation explores the rich variety of Hong Kong romances produced in the 1950s and their social and cultural implications. It argues that these romances are far from being formulaic and thus cannot be homogenized; they carry their own distinct aesthetics as well as the specific social and cultural imprint of the time. This study looks closely at the romances written by four authors, Jie Ke 傑克, Jun Ren 俊人, Meng Jun 孟君, and Zheng Hui 鄭慧. Each of these writers has created works that bear the personal thematic and aesthetic signature while sharing a common practice of borrowing and integrating variegated materials from domestic and foreign literary and visual sources. Jie Ke’s works are a transfigured mixture of the literary conventions of traditional Chinese vernacular fiction. Jun Ren’s cinematic narrative language appropriates and recreates film noir as well as transforms Alfred Hitchcock’s filmic motifs into his own Hong Kong stories. Meng Jun and Zheng Hui infuse their works with a Western gothic aesthetic. These crossbred texts embody a cultural practice that could be very well termed hybridization, a distinctive feature marked by all these romances. It is emphasized that the practice of hybridization is a cultural phenomenon of the time, a budding development of the unique characteristics of Hong Kong culture. This study sheds light on the deliberate misreading and the sophisticated literary transformation of Hong Kong romance writers’ intertextual and intercultural writings. By way of a hybridized form of creation, these romances under study are, on the one hand, articulations of certain social themes, in particular the gender relationship or the anxiety of survival in the city of Hong Kong, and on the other hand, construction of a cultural space that celebrates multifarious artistic expressions. This fluid heterogeneity has become the hallmark of Hong Kong culture and has made possible the continuing robust growth of Hong Kong’s popular literature.