The power of print in modern China : intellectuals and industrial publishing from the end of empire to Maoist state socialism / Robert Culp.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Culp, Robert Joseph, 1966- author.

Series:

Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University

Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Shang wu yin shu guan--History--20th century.

Shang wu yin shu guan.

Zhonghua shu ju--History--20th century.

Zhonghua shu ju.

Shi jie shu ju (Shanghai, China)--History--20th century.

Shi jie shu ju (Shanghai, China).

Publishers and publishing--China--History--20th century.

Publishers and publishing.

History.

China--Intellectual life--20th century.

China.

Intellectual life.

Genre:

History.

Physical Description:

xv, 371 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

New York : Columbia University Press, [2019]

Summary:

Amid early twentieth-century China's epochal shifts, a vital and prolific commercial publishing industry emerged. Recruiting late Qing literati, foreign-trained academics, and recent graduates of the modernized school system to work as authors and editors, publishers produced textbooks, reference books, book series, and reprints of classical texts in large quantities at a significant profit. Work for major publishers provided a living to many Chinese intellectuals and offered them a platform to transform Chinese cultural life. In The Power of Print in Modern China, Robert Culp explores the world of commercial publishing to offer a new perspective on modern China's cultural transformations. Culp examines China's largest and most influential publishing companies--Commercial Press, Zhonghua Book Company, and World Book Company - during the late Qing and Republican periods and into the early years of the People's Republic. He reconstructs editors' cultural activities and work lives as a lens onto the role of intellectuals in cultural change. Examining the distinct Chinese modes of industrial publishing, Culp explains the emergence of the modern Chinese intellectual through commercial and industrial processes rather than through political revolution and social movements. An original account of Chinese intellectual and cultural history as well as global book history, The Power of Print in Modern China offers new perspectives on the production of new forms of knowledge and culture in the twentieth century.

Contents:

Becoming editors: late Qing literatis scholarly lives and cultural production

Universities or factories? Academics, petty intellectuals, and the industrialization of mental labor

Transforming word and concept through textbooks and dictionaries

Repackaging the past: reproducing classics through industrial publishing

Introducing new worlds of knowledge: series publications and the transformation of China's knowledge culture

Print industrialism and state socialism: public-private joint management and divisions of labor in the early PRC publishing industry

Negotiated cultural production in the pedagogical state.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Other Format:

Online version: Culp, Robert Joseph, 1966- Power of print in modern China.

ISBN:

9780231184168

0231184166

OCLC:

1065736356