| The late Qing dynasty newsprint contained political discourses,news events,announcements,literary works,and other kinds of content,constructing a miniature "paper world of the late Qing dynasty".As a unique media artifact image in the late Qing dynasty novel text,newsprint "shines" and assumes an important function in the novel,highlighting the modernity of the intermingling and collision of Chinese and Western cultures that modern China possesses.The emergence of a new medium inevitably changes people’s daily existence and their social relations,and the appearance of newsprint shapes a new kind of interaction between people."Through the depiction of newsprint in the novel,we are shown the rich and vivid historical details of the society and culture of the late Qing Dynasty.After the introduction of newsprint in the modern sense,through the joint efforts of a group of elite newspaper writers and readers,it became an important medium that combined the Chinese literati tradition of clear discussion with the Western freedom of expression,and political enlightenment and commercial entertainment became the two mainstream discourses presented in the late Qing dynasty newsprint;and the emergence of a new literary medium and the dual identity of newspaper novelists also led to changes in writers’ literary concepts and writing styles.The emergence of a new literary medium and the dual identity of newspaper novelists also led to changes in writers’ literary conceptions and writing styles,which made newspaper novelists in the late Qing Dynasty eager to translate the reports in newsprint directly into novel content,forming a wonderful intertextuality between news reports and late Qing Dynasty novel texts.When the newsprint entered the late Qing novel,it played the political function of enlightening the public,the commercial function of publishing announcements,and the amusement and entertainment function of reviewing poems and flower lists in the late Qing novel.At the same time,newsprint also played an important narrative function in shaping the characters and constructing the narrative scenes of novels.The newspaper readers,who read today’s news paper after tea and dinner,flipped through the current news and commented on the poetry and flower lists;or the newspaper deliverers and sellers who played the role of "tools" in the dissemination process of the late Qing Dynasty newspapers,as important participants and observers of the late Qing Dynasty newspaper era,they were given the double point of reality and textual image together with the news paper.The imaginary space of the nation-state and the space of the public sphere are basically related to the print media,The space depicted in the novels for reading newspapers at home and in teahouses and newspaper offices also became a unique narrative scene that distinguished late Qing novels from classical Chinese novels. |
