Lost Voices of Modernity : A Chinese Popular Fiction Magazine in Context

__Lost Voices of Modernity__ uncovers the story of the most popular and perhaps the most maligned modern Chinese literary journal, __Xiaoshuo yuebao (The Short Story Magazine).__ First published in Shanghai in 1910, __Xiaoshuo yuebao__ boasted a circulation of ten thousand within its first three years of publication. Scholars have long characterized the journal as little more than superficial popular entertainment (primarily action/adventure and love stories) and attributed its early popularity to an urban audience's need for distraction and escape. Now, however, Denise Gimpel's persuasive and effective study reveals a journal of serious appearance and intent. By placing publication, contributions, and contributors within their specific cultural, social, and political contexts, Gimpel provides an astonishingly cogent picture of a reform-through-fiction project created and managed by a dedicated body of writers attempting to address the concerns of the day. __Xiaoshuo yuebao__ informed the growing reading public of national and international issues, science, and foreign lands. Read in context, the stories, essays, plays, and poems published in its pages--largely in the form of the "new fiction" that had been hailed as the sociopolitical cure-all of the early twentieth century--constitute a panorama of the reforms being discussed at the time at all levels of public and private life.