Author ｜
Jianhua Chen
Abstract ｜
Recently, the speedy developments of AI technology have challenged human destiny. Since Late Qing, media such as photography, lithography, newspapers, and cinema have brought China into a new era of “imagined communities.” This paper examines a range of novels and pictorial magazines from the perspective of media archeology in order to display how Chinese literary culture has been engaged with global civilization. In the style of photographic realism, Dianshizhai Pictorial and Shanghai Flowers represent the courtesans’ hierarchical system, implying people’s contract relations, capitalist ideology, and metropolitan legal governance. In Tao Zhou’s Shadows under Heaven and Earth, the traditional fiction form serves as a metaphor for imperial chaos; by narrating characters and events, the novel shows the eruption between conception and reality. In Shoujuan Zhou’s My Intimate Beauty, the embodiment of cinematic technology and the human brain denotes that the narrative subjectivity’s self-fashioning creates a new spectacle for the urban cultural landscape. The authors of both image and word have been manipulated by, and meanwhile, have gone beyond media technology in terms of using their sentiments and imagination. While media technology plays a key role in reaching modernity, traditional culture is represented in the form of subconsciousness. Through showing Late Qing Shanghai’s rich achievements in civilization in the realms of material culture, daily urban life, structures of feelings, fashion and feminine publicity, this paper provides a notion of “long revolution” for historical studies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century China.
keywords ｜
Late Qing and early Republic era, global civilization,Shanghai, novel/pictorial magazine, media archeology