All the Feelings That Are Fit to Print; The Community of Sentiment and  

Oleh:

Haiyan, Lee

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Modern China vol. 27 no. 3 (Jul. 2001), page 291-327.
Topik: The Community of Sentiment; The Literary Public Sphere in China
Fulltext: 291MC273.pdf (845.83KB)

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Popular culture in early twentieth-century China exhibited an unmistakably sentimental quality. Itwas a period when countless sentimental narratives (yanqing xiaoshuo) were produced, read, and wept over. Stories with the words sentiment, tears, blood, sorrows, shadows, or bitter regret in their titles filled the pages of fiction journals, entertainment magazines, and the literary supplements of newspapers. The vast majority of these stories were written by the so-called Mandarin Duck and Butterfly writers.1 Surveying Butterfly “love stories” of the 1910s, Perry Link (1981: 54) was much struck by their excessive sentimentality: “The stories grew more blatantly sentimental as their readership grew. . . . Authors would simply piece together one intense scene after another into a story line, seeking to evoke a range of emotions love, anger, pity, sorrow of maximum intensity in minimum space.” Why were contemporary readers so attracted to admittedly soppy stories that scandalized May Fourth critics and have discouraged generations of scholars from taking them seriously? In his pioneering study of the “romantic generation” of modern Chinese writers, Leo Lee (1973: 261) refers to Butterfly writers in passing as “treaty-port journalist-litterateurs” who were committed to the “popularization of sentiment as the central mode of existence.” If sentimentality is a “mode of existence,” then what is the significance of grounding self-identity in sentiment as opposed to, say, in kinship or native-place ties? What ideological beliefs and values are embodied in a sentiment-based subject, or “the man/woman of sentiment” (duoqingren)?

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