Children's Literature and Transnational Knowledge in Modern China: Education, Religion, and Childhood

by Shih-Wen Sue Chen

Overview

This book examines the development of Chinese children’s literature from the late Qing to early Republican era. It highlights the transnational flows of knowledge, texts, and cultures during a time when children’s literature in China and the West was developing rapidly. Drawing from a rich archive of periodicals, novels, tracts, primers, and textbooks, the author analyzes how Chinese children’s literature published by Protestant missionaries and Chinese educators in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries presented varying notions of childhood. In this period of dramatic transition from the dynastic Qing empire to the new Republican China, young readers were offered different models of childhood, some of which challenged dominant Confucian ideas of what it meant to be a child. This volume sheds new light on a little-explored aspect of Chinese literary history. Through its contributions to the fields of children’s literature, book history, missionary history, and translation studies, it enhances our understanding of the negotiations between Chinese and Western cultures that shaped the publication and reception of Chinese texts for children. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9789811360831
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan
Publication date:	04/29/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	18 MB
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About the Author

Shih-Wen Sue Chen is Senior Lecturer in Writing and Literature at Deakin University, Australia. She received her PhD in Literature, Screen and Theatre studies from the Australian National University. She is the author of Representations of China in British Children’s Fiction, 1851-1911 (2013) and has many essays published in peer-reviewed journals and edited collections.

Table of Contents

1. Protestant Missionaries, Chinese Intellectuals, and Children’s Literature.- 2. The Filial Child and the Evangelical Child in Translated Bestsellers and Forgotten Tracts.- 3. “Instructive and Amusing”: Xiaohai yuebao (The Child’s Paper, 1875–1915) and Childhood.- 4. Learning and Play in Mengxue bao (The Children’s Educator) and Qimeng huabao (Enlightenment Pictorial).- 5. Educating the Child: Textbooks, Primers, and Readers.- 6. Conclusion.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Sue Chen shows us through her extensive research the wide range of influences and issues that went into the making of a modern literature for children in China.”(Tim Barrett, Professor Emeritus of East Asian History, SOAS, University of London, UK)

“Chen’s illuminating study excavates the transnational influences which shaped children’s literature in modern China. The book’s deft analysis of texts produced between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries shows how missionaries, translators and Chinese writers promoted powerful ideas about China and its future.” (Clare Bradford, FAHA, Emeritus Professor, Deakin University, Australia)