Popular Magazines and Fiction in Shanghai, 1914-1925: Modernity, the Cultural Imaginary, and the Middle Society

The book explores the rise of Shanghai-based popular magazines produced by the "Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies School" in early twentieth-century China, examining the national, gender, family, and social imaginaries constructed and negotiated through a complex network of relationships between popular writers, magazine editors, and their intended readers. It argues that the cultural imaginaries configurated in these magazine stories articulated a shared quest for modernity, emphasizing sentiment, quotidian experience, the pursuit of the modern family and individual success, strengthening of the nation, and the reinvention of cultural tradition.

Format: Hardback
Length: 412 pages
Publication date: 02 December 2021
Publisher: Lexington Books

This book delves into the emergence of popular magazines in Shanghai during the early twentieth century, focusing on the contributions of the "Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies School." It explores the national, gender, family, and social imaginaries constructed and negotiated through a complex network of relationships between popular writers, magazine editors, and their intended readers. These imaginaries were represented in various forms of popular narratives, including patriotic stories, war/military stories, family narratives, domestic fiction, utopian writings, and industrial-business stories. The author argues that the national imagination, social ideals, and notions of ideal womanhood and the new family were intrinsically linked and integral to the search for cultural identity of the emerging Chinese "middle society" and an expression of their collective sensibilities, experiences, and aspirations. The cultural imaginaries configurated in these magazine stories articulated a shared quest for modernity, emphasizing sentiment, quotidian experience, the pursuit of the modern family and individual success, strengthening of the nation, and the reinvention of cultural tradition. Popular magazines and fiction, therefore, became uniquely instrumental in catalyzing the process of Chinese modernity, which emerged and developed along the symbiotic interrelations between the private and the public, the traditional and the modern, and the real and the imaginary.

Weight: 717g
Dimension: 227 x 160 x 26 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781498544788