Marketing Chinese Children's Books - (Bloomsbury Perspectives on Children's Literature) by Frances Weightman (Hardcover)

About the Book

The first English-language study on contemporary Chinese children's literature, focusing on the theoretical framing of authors through the paratexts of their books and how they are marketed.

Book Synopsis

An exploration of the strategies used by Chinese children's publishers to package and promote their authors, Marketing Chinese Children's Books situates these approaches within their historical, social and cultural contexts and considers what implications this may have for publishers looking to market Chinese children's books to global audiences.
Focusing on the abundant paratextual elements of many contemporary Chinese children's books, including prefaces, interviews, book covers and author photographs, this study reveals the various constraints on the self-fashioning of popular children's authors in the People's Republic of China today. Spotlighting some of China's best-selling children's authors - Cao Wenxuan (the first Chinese recipient of the Hans Christian Andersen Award), Yang Hongying, Shen Shixi and Gerelchimeg Black Crane - Frances Weightman considers how the marketing of these authors constructs and presents them variously as academic and political authorities; friends and confidantes; or trusted guides and gatekeepers of the natural world.
This is a timely study of the construction of Chinese children's authorship coinciding with the rapid expansion of children's literature publishing in China and its reception on the world stage.

About the Author

Frances Weightman is Professor of Chinese Literature at the University of Leeds, UK and is Founding-director of the Leeds Centre for New Chinese Writing. She is the author of The Quest for the Childlike in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Fiction: Fantasy, Naivety and Folly (2008) and has written numerous book chapters, journal articles and edited volumes on Chinese fiction of various time periods. She is editor-in-chief of Writing Chinese: a Journal of Contemporary Sinophone Literature.