A Study On The Spread Of Books And Novels In Shanghai In The Late Qing Dynasty And The Early Republic Of China

In the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republic of China, novels like mushroomsthrived in Shanghai which was a piece of fertile land. There were a variety of reasonsfor novels prosperity at that time in Shanghai: The easing public opinion environment,sophisticated printing equipments, increasingly developed business, novelists’arisingat the historic moment, the broad readership, the charm of the novelsthemselves…The factors were merged into together by book companies to constructa novels transmission system which drived the development of novels at breakneckspeed and made a lot of novel productions at that time. This phenomenon causedthe scholars to explore and think, but studies in the past in terms of the spread of thenovel was not enough systematic. These studies also failed to clearly outline bookcompanies’leading role in the spread of the novel, as book companies were thetotal communicators.My paper centers on book companies to throughout all respect factors whatinfluence the spread of the novel, and analyses the effect of various factors and theinfluence of each other, in order to form a complete novel transmission system. Thefirst chapter discusses the political, economic, cultural and other objective factorsenabling novel development in this period in Shanghai, including ShanghaiConcession’characteristics, publishers, printing equipments, distribution channelsand other specific factors, also introduces overview of the major book companiesand their fiction achievements. The second chapter from the novelists thetransmission elements analyzes the relationships between book companies andwriters, and the writers and novels, to form the inseparable relationship between thethree based on the remuneration system. The third chapter researches the novelconcept of communication and the development of the novel form on the state ofcommercialization. In this chapter, I have reviewed theoretical articles about novelswhich were published in the book companiess newspapers and periodicals. Thesearticles publicized, delimited and interpreted novels in perception. In addition, I havealso studied novels’commercial features in the form of the length, language, etc. These novels as book companies’goods tried their best to attracte readers. The fourthchapter mainly studied the novel under the commercial operations of bookcompanies, the effects of novels’promotion, advertising, as well as the textualfeatures of the novels in the spread of the novel. The fifth chapter discusses theinteractive relationship between book companies and readers which arenovels’audiences. In the appendix, I arrange and the Commercial Press, zhong huaBook Company and other10book companies novels bibliographies. I hope throughthe discussion of the five chapters, this paper has reviewed and expounded the bookcompanies’effects in the novel spread more deeply and comprehensively, anddescribed the complex dynamic picture of novel transmission at that time moreclearly.In the novel dissemination, various factors are synergistic, and they are asystematic whole. Therefore, in the discussion of each chapter, I has always been toexamine the roles of elements in the novel dissemination based on the idea of awhole to make this paper more comprehensive and systematic.