Popular magazines and fiction in Shanghai, 1914-1925 : modernity, the cultural imaginary, and the middle society

This book explores the rise of Shanghai-based popular magazines produced by the “Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies School” in early twentieth-century China. It examines 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, which 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 the 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. This book suggests that the cultural imaginaries configurated in these magazine stories articulated a shared quest for modernity, one that emphasized 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. Cover 1 Half Title 2 Title Page 4 Copyright Page 5 Dedication 6 Contents 8 List of Illustrations 10 List of Illustrations 10 Acknowledgments 12 Author’s Notes 16 List of Abbreviations 18 Introduction 20 Modernity, Imaginaries, and Popular Literature 23 The “Middle Society” in Shanghai 29 Fiction Genres in Early Twentieth-Century China 38 “The Age of the Saturday School” 43 Reading Popular Magazines in Shanghai (1910s–1920s) 49 Chapter Outline 57 Chapter 1: Imagining the Nation: Patriotism in Popular Narratives 62 “Loving Nation”: Sentimentalism and Patriotism 65 Imagining the Nation through the Western “Other” and “Subjugated Nations” 77 Popular Nationalism in Magazine Special Issues 93 Nationalism in (Anti-) War Stories 112 Chapter 2: Constructing the Ideal Womanhood: The Imaginary of the “Wise Mother and Good Wife” 130 Ideals of Womanhood in the Late Qing Press 133 Defining the “Wise Mother and Good Wife” in Women’s Magazines 139 “New Women” as Wise Mothers and Good Wives 147 Hu Binxia’s Modification of the “Wise Mother and Good Wife” 156 “Wise Mother and Good Wife” and the Modern Home 163 Middle-Class Wifehood in Domestic Stories 169 Chapter 3: Constructing the Domestic Sphere: The Imaginary of Ideal Families and Homes 180 The Discourse of Family Reform 182 Ideal Family Structure: Small versus Large Family 189 Ideal Family and Home: The Imagined and the Real 198 Ideal Dwellings and Domestic Interiors 208 Ideal Couples and Children 228 Chapter 4: Constructing the “Middle Society”: Urban Utopias and Industrial-Business Fiction 246 Utopian Narratives in Late Qing: Political Utopias and Ideal Fiction 248 Xu Zhiyan’s Ideal Fiction: From Electrical World to A Model Town 256 Bao Tianxiao’s Ideal Stories: From “Mobile Home” to New Shanghai 268 The Crisis and Future of the Middle Society in Shanghai 277 Industrial-Business Fiction: Promoting Role Models for the Chinese Middle Society 288 The Ethic of Success: The Middle-Class Ordinary Heroes in Saturday 298 Epilogue 312 Frequently Cited Chinese Periodicals 328 Notes 330 Introduction 330 Chapter 1 338 Chapter 2 349 Chapter 3 355 Chapter 4 362 Epilogue 369 Bibliography 372 Index 402 About the Author 412 "This book examines Shanghai-based popular magazines and fiction and their role in catalyzing the process of Chinese modernity in the early twentieth century. The author argues that the national, gender, family, and social imaginaries constructed in popular magazines articulated the values and aspirations of the emerging Chinese "middle society.""-- Provided by publisher