This book is an act of redemption. It retrieves a genre of text that has been banished to the margins of scholarly inquiry but that provides unparalleled access to the complexities of the past: the early Chinese commercial periodical press. Focusing on one particularly innovative example, Funü shibao (The Women’s Eastern Times), and on one of the most significant—and neglected—periods in modern Chinese history, the early Republic, it develops a methodology that both engages the full materiality of the medium and situates it within the arc of historical change. It offers a close reading of the ... More

This book is an act of redemption. It retrieves a genre of text that has been banished to the margins of scholarly inquiry but that provides unparalleled access to the complexities of the past: the early Chinese commercial periodical press. Focusing on one particularly innovative example, Funü shibao (The Women’s Eastern Times), and on one of the most significant—and neglected—periods in modern Chinese history, the early Republic, it develops a methodology that both engages the full materiality of the medium and situates it within the arc of historical change. It offers a close reading of the journal’s cover art, photographs, advertisements, poetry, and discursive texts against one another, uncovering an unbounded space where text, image, and experience meet; where editors, artists, readers, and authors commune. Central to this shared space is the notion of “experience,” the meanings of which are refracted through the key tensions that underlie the journal: tensions between reform and commerce, everyday and epic agendas, male editorial strategies and female authorial tactics. Situating Funü shibao at the conjuncture of interrelated shifts in China’s knowledge, print, medical, commercial, and sexual cultures in the early twentieth century, the book further exposes productive aporias and messy hybrids that ideologically driven history has rendered invisible. It also recovers traces of the modes of reasoning, the look, and the stories of a cast of well-known, little known, and unknown historical actors, including a new demographic of Republican Ladies, all of whom were deeply engaged with the minutia and the monumentality of the twentieth century’s global transformations.