The Adventures of Ma Suzhen

The comic novel, The Adventures of Ma Suzhen, was written during a highpoint in the popularity of xia knight-errant fiction. It is an action-packed tale of a young woman who takes revenge for her brother, Ma Yongzhen, a gangster and performing strongman, who has been murdered by a rival gang in Chinas most cosmopolitan city, Shanghai. After publication of the book in 1923, the character of Ma Suzhen appeared on stage, and subsequently in a film made by the Mingxing Film Company. The book version translated here, displays a delightful combination of the xia and popularMandarin Ducks and Butterflies genres, with additional elements of Gongan court case fiction. The translation is followed by an essay that explores the background to the legend of Ma Suzhen - a fictional figure, whose exhilarating escapades reflect some of the new possibilities and freedoms available to women following the founding of the Chinese Republic.

Paul Bevan is Departmental Lecturer in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford. From 2018 to 2020 he worked as Christensen Fellow in Chinese Painting at the Ashmolean Museum. Paul has taught modern Chinese literature, history, and visual culture at the University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge, and the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). His primary research interests concern the impact of Western art and literature on China during the Republican Period (1912-1949), particularly with regard to periodicals and magazines. His research on artists George Grosz, Frans Masereel, and Miguel Covarrubias, all of whom worked for Vanity Fair, has resulted in extensive research on both Chinese and Western pictorial magazines. Pauls first book A Modern Miscellany - Shanghai Cartoon Artists, Shao Xunmeis Circle and the Travels of Jack Chen, 1926-1938, Leiden: Brill, 2015, was hailed as a major contribution to modern Chinese studies; hissecond: Intoxicating Shanghai: Modern Art and Literature in Pictorial Magazines during Shanghais Jazz Age was published by Brill in April 2020.