Republican Lens: Gender, Visuality, and Experience in the Early Chinese Periodical Press (Asia: Local Studies/ Global Themes): 30 - Hardcover

Judge, Joan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520284364 ISBN 13: 9780520284364

Publisher: University of California Press, 2015

Synopsis

What can we learn about modern Chinese history by reading a marginalized set of materials from a widely neglected period? In Republican Lens, Joan Judge retrieves and revalorizes the vital brand of commercial culture that arose in the period surrounding China's 1911 Revolution. Dismissed by high-minded ideologues of the late 1910s and largely overlooked in subsequent scholarship, this commercial culture has only recently begun to be rehabilitated in mainland China. Judge uses one of its most striking, innovative - and continually mischaracterized - products, the journal Funu shibao (The women's eastern times), as a lens onto the early years of China's first Republic. Redeeming both the value of the medium and the significance of the era, she demonstrates the extent to which the commercial press channeled and helped constitute key epistemic and gender trends in China's revolutionary twentieth century. The book develops a cross-genre and inter-media method for reading the periodical press and gaining access to the complexities of the past. Drawing on the full materiality of the medium, Judge reads cover art, photographs, advertisements, and poetry, editorials, essays, and readers' columns in conjunction with and against one another, as well as in their broader print, historical and global contexts. This yields insights into fundamental tensions that governed both the journal and the early Republic. It also highlights processes central to the arc of twentieth-century knowledge culture and social change: the valorization and scientization of the notion of "experience," the public actualization of "Republican Ladies," and the amalgamation of "Chinese medicine" and scientific biomedicine. It further revives the journal's editors, authors, medical experts, artists, and, most notably, its little known female contributors. Republican Lens captures the ingenuity of a journal that captures the chaotic potentialities within China's early Republic and its global twentieth centu

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Review:

"Judge sheds light on how women's lives were lived and conceptualized in the economically advanced cities of the new Chinese Republic... Republican Lens offers a complex portrait of Chinese urban life in the second decade of the 20th century. . . . Highly Recommended."-- (03/01/2016)

About the Author:

Joan Judge is Professor at York University. She is the author of The Precious Raft of History: The Past, the West, and the Woman Question in China and Print and Politics: 'Shibao' and the Culture of Reform in Late Qing China.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0520284364
• ISBN 13: 9780520284364
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 368