ABSTRACT
How does an author become a professional? Historians of twentieth-century Chinese media and culture have over the last few decades provided detailed studies of the social and institutional contexts within which certain writers began to earn a living from their fiction and journalism: the family backgrounds of these newly professional authors, the schooling that they received, the publishers that they worked for, the newspapers and magazines in which their work was often published, the transformations of publishing practice after the institution of copyright law, and the new groups of readers that consumed their work in the 1920s and 1930s.1 And as Perry Link has shown, the rhetorics of the “man of letters” (wenren ) and the “genius of the foreign mall” (yangchang caizi ), who claimed to be above writing for money, flourished from the 1910s forward, drawing heavily from the romantic tradition of misunderstood caizi (genius, or man of talent) in Chinese literature.2 There has been rather less attention, however, to the process through which the author is imagined as a professional, one who writes regularly and prolifically for compensation. This chapter investigates the formation of the figure of the professional author within the fictional narratives that those authors themselves produced, in order to demonstrate how a social role can be proposed in literary texts and subsequently adapted as a norm according to which social practice can be organized. How does this figure of the professional author relate to the growing significance of the authorial name as a brand name in the early Republican period? What are the reasons for readers’ continued interest in the narratives that this kind of author produced? I aim to show, first, the anxieties inherent in the professional author’s attempt at self-definition; second, the mediating role that the successful professional author plays between concepts of capital and labor; and, finally, how the particular kind of readerly desire arising from the installment publication format constitutes the necessary foundation without which the professional author would be a far less significant cultural figure.
