The Influence Of Literary Editing On Shanghai's Literature During The Occupation Period

The thesis focuses on the literary Editors’ influence on Shanghai literature in Japanese-occupied Period and mainly investigates how the literary editors planed,shaped and directed the development of Shanghai literature when faced political influence,cultural market,aesthetic tendency and personal preference.The overall framework of the thesis is based on the process of literature creation,dissemination and consumption-including choosing subjects,processing literary themes,popularizing certain literary styles and promoting reader reception.Specifically,the thesis analyzes:how the political atmosphere in Shanghai restricted the freedom of writing and publishing;what kind of text strategies were used to regulate the literary development(acceptance of popular literature,affirmation of female perspective,etc.);as well as how the editors played an essential role.Although literary editors in Japanese-occupied Shanghai were chosen as the research subject,the investigation should be placed in the macro background of the era.We must pay attention to the continuation of new literature tradition and the differences between political territories.The introduction part describes the core concepts related to topics,the history and current situation of topic research and the breakthroughs and innovations in this paper,as well as the overall framework and research ideas of this paper.The first chapter mainly discusses the political environment and social atmosphere in Japanese-occupied Shanghai,elaborated the unique way of literature creation which relied on literary journals and then analyzed the Chinese literati’s mental attitudes and aesthetic tendency.Since Japanese intruders’ supervision and censorship kept official publishers and intellectuals silent,Shanghai is in the danger of cultural stagnation.Literary journals,as a buffer strategy,played a pivotal role for the recovery of Shanghai literature.In this chapter,literary journals are classified and reviewed from the different standpoints and purposes of the literary editors.The second chapter discusses the three most popular literary subjects in Japanese-occupied Shanghai(ordinary life,female subject,historical subject)and emphasizes the important role that literary editors played in subject-choosing.The special political and cultural context in Japanese-occupied Shanghai led to the special atmosphere,literary narrative was given political meanings.Literary editors instructed writers to select literary subject carefully to avoid possible political persecution.The productive compromises led to the development of literature,survival of their journals and effective dissemination of publications.The third chapter discusses the impetus that the literary editors gave to the flourish of popular literature and feminist literature in Shanghai during the occupation.Considering the complicated situation,the literary editors provided writers with theoretical and practical guidance on how to process literary themes by initiating"Popular Literature Movement" and organizing debates.They also highly praised female perspective in literature creation in order to encourage female writers complete a real self-statements calmly,which had both literary and social significance.The fourth chapter mainly analyzes how the literary editors facilitated the prevalence of two literary styles-prose and reportage.Prosperity of any literary style has to meet both the community desire and the inherent logic of literature.The literary editors in occupied Shanghai grasped such intersection to guide the writers’ creation and readers’ aesthetic preference by setting up new columns,calling for articles extensively,organizing collective creations.Although the literati were facing unprecedented shackles and persecution,the literature of Japanese-occupied Shanghai still inherited the new literature tradition and resisted the cultural aggression.The fifth chapter investigates the relationship between the literary editors and reader reception in Japanese-occupied Shanghai.The literary editors consciously set ordinary people as target audiences to establish their own editorial principles and operation strategies.To some extent,newspapers,editors,authors and readers had formed a real complicity-rational elite culture shake hands with the secular,sensual mass culture products have come a long way.This chapter elaborates on why the literary editors worked together to build Eileen Chang’s literary legend(meeting the expectations of the reader and the author’s vision of innovation expectations),as well as how the editors organized drama critics to influence the readers subtly.The conclusion part emphasizes the literary editors’ efforts for obtaining the autonomy and legitimacy of literature during the Japanese-occupied period.Faced with the political logic and the marketing logic,they operated the journals commercially with adhering to the inner principles,thus achieved the goal of comforting,inspiring and fighting.The literary editors’ complex mental attitude and publishing career may provide a useful reference to contemporary intellectuals that how to settle down in the society of commodity economy.