Gimpel: Lost Voices of Modernity CL

A Chinese Popular Fiction Magazine in Context

Author: Denise Gimpel

Scholars have long characterized ""Xiaoshuo yuebao"" as little more than superficial popular entertainment and attributed its early popularity to an urban audience's need for distraction and escape. Now, however, Denise Gimpel's study reveals a journal of serious appearance and intent.

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This title uncovers the story of the most popular and perhaps the most maligned modern Chinese literary journal, ""Xiaoshuo yuebao"" (""The Short Story Magazine""). First published in Shanghai in 1910, ""Xiaoshuo yuebao"" boasted a circulation of ten thousand within its first three years of publication. Scholars have long characterized the journal as little more than superficial popular entertainment (primarily action/adventure and love stories) and attributed its early popularity to an urban audience's need for distraction and escape. Now, however, Denise Gimpel's study reveals a journal of serious appearance and intent. By placing publication, contributions, and contributors within their specific cultural, social, and political contexts, Gimpel provides an astonishingly cogent picture of a reform-through-fiction project created and managed by a dedicated body of writers attempting to address the concerns of the day. ""Xiaoshuo yuebao"" informed the growing reading public of national and international issues, science, and foreign lands. Read in context, the stories, essays, plays, and poems published in its pages - largely in the form of the ""new fiction"" that had been hailed as the sociopolitical cure-all of the early 20th century - constitute a panorama of the reforms being discussed at the time at all levels of public and private life.