Jin Yong’s wuxia stories in English translation: knowing readers’ rupture and re-imagination

Abstract

Jin Yong’s wuxia novels are hugely popular across Chinese-speaking communities, yet they have proven difficult to receive in the Anglophone world. This disparity is often attributed to the genre’s saturated “Chineseness” and its alleged untranslatability. Such claims are frequently voiced by bilingual knowing readers who first inhabited Jin Yong’s storyworld in Chinese and later return to it in English, where they register mismatches that are often judged through authenticity-based evaluations. This thesis reframes these mismatches as phenomenological ruptures shaped by prior familiarity with Jin Yong’s wuxia world. It argues that such familiarity is not merely knowledge of plot or cultural reference, but a sedimented, pre-reflective orientation to how the wuxia world feels, sounds, and holds together.

To explain how this orientation is disturbed, the thesis develops the concept of instrumental certainty: the tacit trust that translated reading will provide a transparent route back to an already inhabited narrative world. When translation disrupts this trust, knowing readers experience narrative rupture and enter a chronicle-like mode of attention that holds discontinuities in view without immediately reducing them to success or failure. In this suspended interval, rupture becomes disclosive, making backgrounded narrative cues newly perceptible and enabling renewed orientation.

The thesis develops this argument through three case studies. Chapter Two examines sonic rupture by tracing how onomatopoeic cueing in fight scenes is re-mediated in English. Chapter Three analyses narratorial explicitness in The Deer and the Cauldron, showing how clarifying renderings reposition readers in relation to ambiguity. Chapter Four examines jianghu, arguing that it is already a fluid cultural field in Chinese and that translation extends this mobility through multiple coexisting renderings. Overall, the thesis argues that disrupted familiarity need not signal translational failure, but can generate new forms of engagement, re-imagination, and narrative coherence across languages.

Thesis is embargoed until 31 July 2031.

Date of Award	Jul 2026
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Queen's University Belfast
Sponsors	Chinese Scholarship Council (CSC)
Supervisor	Sue-Ann Harding (Supervisor) & Chen-En Ho (Supervisor)