Sentimental Letters in the Postal Age: Media, Communication, and Emotion in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Epistolary Literature and Culture

Abstract

This thesis seeks to understand the discursive emergence of the intimate relationship between letters and sentimental feelings by examining various texts that are either composed of or about “sentimental letters” in early twentieth-century Chinese popular literature. Theories from media studies will be employed to understand letters as a form of media and the exchange of letters as a process of communication. Based on this distinction, I respectively analyze the multiple mediations of emotion in Xu Zhenya’s Jade Pear Spirit (1912), the transmission of sorrowful feelings in Bao Tianxiao’s “Soaring Wild Goose” (1915) and Zhou Shoujuan’s “Returning Wild Goose in the Netherworld” (1921), and the undelivered sentimental letters in Jiang Hongjiao’s postal stories (1921-1925). This thesis proposes that the sentimental letters embody heightened consciousness and sensibilities around media, communication, and postal delivery in relation to the overflowing expression of emotion. The specific ways in which emotion is mediated and communicated by letters offer rich insights into a series of intersubjective issues, including gender relations, in the face of the postal age.