This book explores the rise of Shanghai-based popular magazines produced by the “Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies School” in early twentieth-century China. It examines the national, gender, family, and social imaginaries constructed and negotiated through a complex network of relationships between popular writers, magazine editors, and their intended readers, which were represented in various forms of popular narratives, including patriotic stories, war/military stories, family narratives, domestic fiction, utopian writings, and industrial-business stories. The author argues that the national imagination, social ideals, and the notions of ideal womanhood and the new family, were intrinsically linked and integral to the search for cultural identity of the emerging Chinese “middle society” and an expression of their collective sensibilities, experiences, and aspirations. This book suggests that the cultural imaginaries configurated in these magazine stories articulated a shared quest for modernity, one that emphasized sentiment, quotidian experience, the pursuit of the modern family and individual success, strengthening of the nation, and the reinvention of cultural tradition. Popular magazines and fiction, therefore, became uniquely instrumental in catalyzing the process of Chinese modernity, which emerged and developed along the symbiotic interrelations between the private and the public, the traditional and the modern, and the real and the imaginary.

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Mao engagingly evokes the dynamism of Chinese middle-class life and aspirations through detailed analyses of popular novels and mass-circulation magazines in Shanghai during the early years of the Republic of China. Just as early-20th-century US magazines (Saturday Evening Post, Ladies’ Home Journal) entertainingly instilled middle-class values in their readerships, Shanghai periodicals—e.g., Saturday (Lĭbàiliù) and Ladies’ Journal (Fùnǚ zázhì)—helped early-Republican-era middle-class readers navigate the rapidly changing Chinese sociocultural landscape…. Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.