Children's Literature and Transnational Knowledge in Modern China

Education, Religion, and Childhood
1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-981-13-6082-4
Verlag: Springer

Buch, Englisch, 251 Seiten, Format (B × H): 153 mm x 216 mm, Gewicht: 463 g

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. 

Zielgruppe

Research

Autoren/Hrsg.

Chen, Shih-Wen Sue

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Kinder- und Jugendliteratur, Märchen, Mythen, Sagen
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Asiatische Geschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

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 huaba o ( Enlightenment Pictorial ).- 5. Educating the Child: Textbooks, Primers, and Readers.- 6. Conclusion.

Über Autor(innen)

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.