Encyclopedic Audiences: Readership of Late Ming and Late Qing Compendia for Everyday Life

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel Proposal Application

Abstract

This panel brings together junior and senior scholars of literature, cultural studies, and history from five countries—Taiwan, Hong Kong, Germany, the United States, and Canada—to probe one of the most difficult questions in the study of Chinese cultural history: readership. Its focus is on the broader reading public, on encyclopedias designed to help readers navigate everyday life, and on two crucial moments in the development of both these materials and the Chinese reading public: the late Ming when encyclopedias for everyday life were first published, and the late Qing and early Republic when they underwent radical changes after several centuries of relative stability.
Participants in the panel use various strategies to probe the question of readership. They closely read paratexts including covers and prefaces which served as advertisements for late Ming daily use encyclopedias (Brokaw). They analyze the curious mix of recent and historical materials integrated into the supplements to late Qing editions of Ming encyclopedias (Judge). They also probe the ways these texts functioned by examining specific subsets of encyclopedia readers. These include foreign readers, specifically Edo Japanese elites who read, reprinted, and integrated Ming encyclopedia into their own knowledge systems (Lin). They also include women who were not targeted readers but who may, nonetheless, have been actual readers of early-twentieth-century daily use materials (Mittler).
The discussant, Hsiao-ti Li will bring his unparalleled expertise on late imperial popular culture, reading practices, and encyclopedias to bear on these questions of texts, forms, and readers. Chris Hamm, a scholar of popular literature, will serve as chair.

Area of Study

• China and Inner Asia

Session Organizer

• Joan Joan Judge, York University

Chair

• John Christopher Hamm, University of Washington

Individual Presentations

• Reading for the Republic: Old Texts and New Meanings in Encyclopedias for Everyday Life - Joan Judge, York University

• The Transmission of Wanbao Quanshu 萬寶全書 in Edo Japan - Kuei-ju Lin, National Chengchi University

• Gendering Form and Content: Women Readers of Early 20th Century Chinese Encyclopedia - Barbara Mittler, Heidelberg University

Discussant

• Hsiao-ti Li, City University of Hong Kong