Selling modernity: A study of 'All-Story Monthly' ('Yueyue Xiaoshuo') in the late Qing context

This dissertation studies how the idea of modernity was represented in All-Story Monthly in the late Qing context. The Introduction offers the literary background and a survey of state-of-the-art scholarship on late Qing journalism. It also answers what "modern" and "modernity" meant in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century China by conceptualizing these ideas on three levels. Chapter One provides an overview of All-Story Monthly. The content and the shape of All-Story Monthly are also examined in Chapter One. Chapter Two focuses on one important but less-explored agency of Chinese modernity in literary journals: pictures. I divide these images into three categories: portraits, landscapes, and reproductions of Chinese artistic works. Chapter Three studies science fiction novels and "new" sequels to famous Chinese vernacular novels in All-Story Monthly. Chapter Four concentrates on the study of detective stories, as well as two related but "reformed" genres, court-case (gong'an) stories and knight-errant (xiayi) novels in All-Story Monthly. I demonstrate how these detective stories brought modern elements to the genre of court-case novel. Chapter Five examines how traditional caizi jiaren characters became modern caizi jiaren and how late Qing writers used love stories as an effective way to establish a nation-state in All-Story Monthly. Chapter Six is a short chapter that examines what I call "miscellaneous" accounts of modernity. By "miscellaneous," I refer to entries of non-fiction translation including newspaper articles and statistics, riddles, and non-fiction columns written by Chinese contributors. The non-fiction translations in All-Story Monthly included statistical information in the appendixes and Zhou Guisheng's column, Xin'an's Collected Translations ("Xin'an yicui") This was an alternative form of "Western learning" (xixue). Chapter Seven is the conclusion of my dissertation. I conclude that All-Story Monthly offered late Qing readers a convenient, cheap, but problematic window into ways of connecting with the modern world. The journal operated as a mirror which accurately and unfailingly reflected the reality of late Qing literati's attitudes toward being modern: a mixed feeling of excitement, fear, embarrassment, attraction, and resistance. All-Story Monthly had its own agendas: the editors made their own selections of what to publish, and what they judged to be significant, out of the late Qing Zeitgeist. While texts and images in All-Story Monthly usually contained an identifiable meaning, this meaning could always be negotiated, resisted, embraced, or ignored by its late Qing readers. Neither the editors nor the readers were likely to get all what they wanted, but All-Story Monthly definitely provided some of what they needed.