In this major new collection, an international team of scholars examine the relationship between the Chinese women's periodical press and global modernity in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The essays in this richly illustrated volume probe the ramifications for women of two monumental developments in this period: the intensification of China's encounters with foreign powers and a media transformation comparable in its impact to the current internet age. The book offers a distinctive methodology for studying the periodical press, which is supported by the development of a bilingual database of early Chinese periodicals. Throughout the study, essays on China are punctuated by transdisciplinary reflections from scholars working on periodicals outside of the Chinese context, encouraging readers to rethink common stereotypes about lived womanhood in modern China, and to reconsider the nature of Chinese modernity in a global context.

Presents the first close reading of the Chinese periodical press in a global, transregional and transdisciplinary context

Proposes a distinctive new methodology for studying the periodical press

Encourages readers to rethink issues of gender and genre in the digital age

Michel Hockx, University of Notre Dame, Indiana

Michel Hockx is Professor of Chinese literature and director of the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He has published widely on modern Chinese literary communities, their practices and their values, their printed and digital publications, and their relationship to the state. His monograph Internet Literature in China (2015) was listed by Choice magazine as one of the 'Top 25 Outstanding Academic Titles of 2015'.

Joan Judge, York University, Toronto

Joan Judge is Professor in the Department of History at York University in Toronto, Canada. She is the author of Republican Lens: Gender, Visuality, and Experience in the Early Chinese Periodical Press (2015), The Precious Raft of History: The Past, the West, and the Woman Question in China (2008, awarded Honourable Mention, Wallace K. Ferguson Prize), Print and Politics: 'Shibao' and the Culture of Reform in Late Qing China (1996), and co-editor of Beyond Exemplar Tales: Women's Biography in Chinese History (2011). She is currently engaged in an SSHRC-funded project with the working title 'Quotidian Concerns: Everyday Knowledge and the Rise of the Common Reader in China, 1870–1949'.

Barbara Mittler, Universität Heidelberg

Barbara Mittler holds a Chair in Chinese Studies at the University of Heidelberg. She is Director of the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies. She holds an M.A. from the University of Oxford (1990). Her Ph.D. (1994) and her habilitation (1998) are both from Heidelberg. In 2000 she received the Heinz-Maier-Leibnitz-Prize. In 2013, her book-length study of the Chinese Cultural Revolution won the Fairbank Prize by the American Historical Association. Her research focuses on cultural production in (greater) China covering a wide range of topics from music to (visual) and (historical) print media in China's long modernity.

Contributors

Joan Judge, Barbara Mittler, Michel Hockx, Julia F. Andrews, Liying Sun, Ellen Widmer, Jennifer Scanlon, Grace Fong, Doris Sung, Jin-Zhu Huang, Rachel Hsu, Siao-chen Hu, Maria af Sandeberg, Nathalie Cooke, Jennifer Garland, Nanxiu Qian, Xia Xiaohong, Paul Bailey, Harriet Evans