
Deadline: March 1st, 2023
Payment: Fiction: 10¢/word USD, Poetry: $50 per poem, Non-Fiction: $50 for a column, $40 for a reprinted essay, $150 for an original essay, $45 to an interviewer, and $45 to an interviewee, $20 to a roundtable moderator, and $20 to each other contributor
Theme: Stories that fit in wuxia and xianxia fiction
Imagine yourself as a sword fighter, a vigilante hero and upholder of justice. Imagine you are a xia in the world of jianghu—whether a solitary traveller on a mission, an outlaw on the run, or a member of a powerful sect or dying clan. Or imagine you are a Daoist cultivator, soaring across the sky atop swords and clouds, with a story that stretches across realms and even lifetimes.
Welcome to the Wuxia & Xianxia Special, fellow walkers of the jianghu.
Many of us have become fans of wuxia and xianxia fiction ever since we first encountered eminent wuxia and xianxia authors like Jin Yong, Gu Long, and Huan Zhu Lou Zhu. Others among us fell in love with these genres through films from the Shaw Brothers Studio, Pili puppet shows, drama adaptations, RPGs, manhua, and other kinds of popular media.
Over the past decade, there has also been a new and revived interest in the xianxia genre with the rise of web novels, and more recently, through the lens of danmei, as shown by the popularity of dramas like The Untamed.
For this special issue, we are interested in:
- Traditional and new approaches to wuxia and xianxia fiction
- Stories full of action, conflict, drama, and intrigue
- Rich, diverse, colourful, and nuanced worldbuilding, whether featuring the jianghu, a xianxia world, the imperial court, or other kinds of setting
- Unique approaches to classic wuxia themes like honour, free love, good versus evil, and individual choice versus fate
- Re-imaginings of what these genres look like in the 21st century
- Works that experiment with, subvert, and reinvent genre tropes, including in combination with other Sinophone literary traditions such as danmei, chuanyue (time travel), gong’an fiction (court case), and beyond
The editors for the Wuxia/Xianxia Special invite you to submit fiction, poetry, translations, and nonfiction.
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