A gothic Taoism and its dual facets: possible worlds in The Haunted Monastery

Pan Xie ()
Additional contact information
Pan Xie: Southwest Jiaotong University

Palgrave Communications, 2024, vol. 11, issue 1, 1-10

Abstract: Abstract Recent scholarship has argued for a Western basis for the Judge Dee Mysteries, a detective fiction series by Sinologist Robert van Gulik (1910–1967) set in Tang China. But these studies primarily focus on how Chinese elements are recreated to cater to Anglophone readers’ tastes, neglecting to discuss their actual Western origins in any detail. This paper will make the attempt by focusing on one of the novels, The Haunted Monastery, to investigate how Gothic Taoism is projected through the internal organization of the semantic universe (characters, settings, and conflicts) in the multiple worlds of this detective fiction. It observes how van Gulik recreates anti-religious conventions in the traditional Western Gothic novel and in Chinese courtroom fiction. This artistic innovation highlights the dual facets of Taoism in the story, as it navigates between the realms of crime and faith. On the one hand, it faces the purely divine world, while on the other, it faces the secular world dominated by limitless desire.

Date: 2024
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1057/s41599-024-03256-2 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palcom:v:11:y:2024:i:1:d:10.1057_s41599-024-03256-2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/palcomms/about

DOI: 10.1057/s41599-024-03256-2

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Palgrave Communications from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().