20th century asian history
20th century chinese history
A01=Joan Judge
Author_Joan Judge
Category=JPH
Category=JPWQ
Category=NHF
Category=NHTV
china
chinese revolution
commercial culture
commercial press
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
gender studies
gender trends
government and governing
historical
history
journal funu shibao
last imperial dynasty
modernization of china
national unity
nationalism
new national government
political power
qing dynasty
republic of china
republicanism
retrospective
revolution
revolution of 1911
revolutionaries
social change
womens eastern times
wuchang uprising
xinhai revolution
Product details
- ISBN 9780520284364
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 21 Jul 2015
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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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 century.
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.
