Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities
Spring 2008 Semester Seminar Series No. 2
“Gutenberg in China?! An Overview of Recent Scholarly Views
Regarding Modern Chinese Print and Publishing Culture”
Associate Professor of Modern Chinese History
The Ohio State University, USA
Editor-in-Chief for Twentieth-Century China
2007-08 Fulbright Senior Scholar Researcher
Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, Taiwan
10:30 – 12:00 am, 8 March 2008 (Saturday)
Library Auditorium II
Language: English
Abstract:
What can recent research on the Chinese book and modern journals tell us about public communication, and by extension public life, in China over the past two centuries? By examining the concepts of print culture, print commerce, and print capitalism, three concepts that have dominated recent efforts of historians to understand the impacts of modern communications on early- and late-modern societies, including China, this talk will engage this question.
As in previous periods of modern studies of Chinese printing and book culture, these contemporary scholarly concepts have originated in the West, albeit in different countries (France, Germany, England, and to a lesser extent America), all with mature bodies of critical scholarly book and print culture histories. As also happened with earlier concepts guiding the modern history of the Chinese book, these complementary concepts are today stimulating, in varying degrees, both Chinese and non-Chinese historians of the Chinese book to reevaluate older scholarly conclusions about modern Chinese intellectual life.
Because of the beneficial and ever-growing mutual influence of Chinese and non-Chinese scholars on one another, this talk will discuss both representative
Chinese- and Western-language scholarly works. The road map of China’s modern book history as well as of its print and publishing culture is a work in progress and it has a legend composed in many languages.
ALL ARE WELCOME!