Reading, Representing And The Collective Mentalities

Concerning my dissertation, so much work has been done on thepublications and reading in the late Qing period that it is a privilege for me to join thelarge and still growing scholarship. Deeply indebted to both the illuminative westernstudies of the history of book/reading and the Chinese scholarship of the publicationsin modem China, I intend to dig into the rich literature of newspapers and periodicalsand find my way out with the perspective of history of book/reading. In thisdissertation, advertisements catch my greatest attention and become a major part ofthe primary resource, and the long-neglected "hygienic" books, including those onHygiene, Physiology and Reproductive Medicine, are given prominence to.Interesting enough, these books and their advertisements were connected to the codesof the body, the race and the state. Such a rhetoric tactics not only justified theircirculation, but also made them worthy to be read. The dissertation focuses on threemajor questions: 1) The circulations, prices, orientations of the hygienic books; 2)How they were read and commented on? And 3) what they meant to people of thatday? In addition, I try to situate the "hygienic" books on the cultural market and betterunderstand their social influence by comparing them with other relevant genres ofwritings. Efforts to construct/imagine certain connection to such codes as the body,the race and the state are detected in the hygienic books themselves and theiradvertisements. Moreover, to extend our analysis to the advertisements of other booksand commercial goods, the similar construction/imagination can be perceived likewise.Also, new types of consumptive and reading cultures were taking shape at the sametime. It was especially manifest in the politicalization of consumptive culture. Suchendeavors to pan-politicalize the mass culture illustrated that, a new political culturehad taken shape and functioned well in the late Qing China. In the interest of the state,the means to "power the people", "enlighten the people" and "renovate the mores"were employed.