Fiction in Late Qing and Early Republican China: The Ecology of Genre

John Christopher Hamm will speak on fiction in China at UC Berkeley.

The late Qing “Revolution in Fiction” saw a proliferation of fiction genres and, more fundamentally, a new concern with the very notion of genre. This nascent discourse on genre was both descriptive and prescriptive; even as it sought to taxonomize and evaluate new varieties of fiction, it simultaneously promoted their creation. In fruitful interaction with the discursive ferment were developments in the publishing industry, which marketed a new form of fiction periodical to newly discovered readerships. This talk explores the functioning of genre in the world of early 20th-century Chinese fiction through an examination of the institutional and discursive interaction between what was arguably the most successful of “imported” fiction genres—the detective story—and an iconically “native form”—martial arts fiction.