A Study Of Epistolary Instruction For Students In The Republican Period

The discussion on letter-writing was one of the hot topics among intellectuals during the Republican Period. In particular, the knowledge on letter-writing for young students has once attracted lots of people’s attention and given rise to widespread controversy.This article notices this interesting phenomenon and attempts to propose a reasonable explanation for it. In brief, editors of letter manuals focused more on the contents of letters rather than on the formal properties of actual letters, and it was the former that, this article suggests, significantly caused discrepancies on the practicality of letter manuals. Since letter manuals for young students flourished during the Republican Period, it aroused a series of thought-provoking questions:why the knowledge of letter-writing was so popular during this period of time? What kind of change happened to the young students then? How did these letters adapt to this change? What’s the characteristic of epistolary education culture at that time? What did this kind of education mean to the young students?To solve these problems, this article will focus on ten kinds of letter manuals for students and the main body will be divided into five chapters. The second chapter briefly introduces the publication of these ten letter manuals for students. The third chapter tries to account for the popularity of these manuals and observes what changes have taken place compared to the letter manuals for the beginners in ancient China. The forth chapter examines editorial strategies widely used at that time, including the languages, categories and illustrations, and elaborates how they have echoed these new practical purposes during the Republican Period. The fifth chapter explores the imagination for model students concealed in these best-sellers, which was corresponding with contemporary opinions toward children, and shows some new features of model standards for students during the Republican Period. The sixth chapter depicts a real epistolary anecdote in1930s, which reflects that writing letters for others had an enormous influence upon young students. More importantly, this article puts forward that the acquisition of letter-writing enriched students’ roles in their family life and social life, and to some extent, endowed them with a remarkable capability of social mobilization. Therefore, writing became an opportunity for young students to step into the stage of history.