Knowledge Configuration and Common Readerships in Late-Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth-Century China

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

How did advances in commercial publishing from the late Ming period onward affect how and what Chinese people knew? This panel asks how new modes of knowledge, in terms of both content and form, were configured and made available to common readers. It argues that ever-increasing numbers and kinds of common readers acquired knowledge through diverse print media, such as journals, compendia , and series publications. Diversity in media corresponded to plural forms of knowledge, including everyday, mass, gendered, and foreign academic knowledge, which varied by contexts of production and consumption. By considering the whole communication circuit—from producer to user—this panel proposes new methods and findings in studying China’s emergent modern knowledge culture.

Judge’s paper explores how the compendia Wanbao quanshu provided alternate kinds of information and evidence of distinct modes of knowing that differed from those proffered by the more widely studied “new media” of the period. Mittler analyzes the contexts and paratexts of Republican print media to discuss functions of female readers in the making of gendered knowledge. Culp assesses how series publications (congshu) ostensibly aimed at divergent readerships all presented modern, Western knowledge as essential to national transformation and creatively synthesized multiple foreign works. Feng’s paper investigates a reading program that leftwing and communist intellectuals developed among urban workers, utilizing print media to foster a knowledge culture focused on urban workers’ everyday lives.

Chair Eugenia Lean will frame the panel with opening comments. Rudolf Wagner, one of the world’s leading experts on Chinese print media, will serve as discussant.

Area of Study

• China and Inner Asia

Session Organizer

• Miao Feng, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater

Chair

• Eugenia Lean, Columbia University

Individual Presentations

• Modes of Knowing: Compendia for Everyday Life and the Rise of the Common Reader in Early-Twentieth-Century China - Joan Judge, York University

• Elite or Populist? Series Publications, Readerships, and the Configuration of Knowledge in Republican China - Robert J. Culp, Bard College

• Tracing the Elusive: Female Readers in the Early Republic - Barbara Mittler, Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies

• Shaping a Reading Culture among Urban Workers in 1930s China - Miao Feng, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater

Discussant

• Rudolf Wagner, Heidelberg University