About Shidai Wenxue

Shidai Wenxue

Overview

Shidai Wenxue, known in English as Literature of the Times, is a Chinese-language literary journal published in Jinan, the capital of Shandong province. Founded in 1989, it is supervised and sponsored by the Shandong Writers Association and appears as a bimonthly, carrying novellas and short fiction, reportage, poetry, and literary criticism and theory. Its registered identifiers are ISSN 1005-4677 and the Chinese domestic serial number CN 37-1173/I, and its postal distribution code is 24-84. Journal directories class it as a provincial-level journal and describe it as a title of considerable national reach for a provincial literary magazine. Shidai Wenxue is one of the principal literary periodicals of Shandong, a province with a deep modern literary tradition, and it is distinct from the province's older journal Shandong Wenxue, whose origins go back to 1950. This profile sets out the verified record of the journal: its founding and sponsorship, its registration and distribution details, its standing columns and the genres it publishes, the scholarly work that has appeared in its pages, its submission and review practices, and its place within the system of writers-association literary journals through which much of contemporary Chinese literature has historically reached its first readers.

Founding and Sponsorship

Shidai Wenxue was founded in 1989 in Jinan. The year matters to its character. The journal was created at the end of a decade in which China's literary periodicals had served as the primary arena for new fiction and poetry, and in which provincial writers associations across the country maintained journals as their main platform for local and national writing. Rather than being a commercial launch, Shidai Wenxue was established inside that association system: both its supervising authority (zhuguan danwei) and its sponsoring body (zhuban danwei) are the Shandong Writers Association, the provincial branch organisation of China's writers. That dual role means the association is responsible for the journal's direction and for its operation, and that the journal functions as one of the association's official outlets for literary work produced in and beyond Shandong. The journal's editorial address is recorded in publisher information at 40 Shunyu Road in Jinan, postcode 250002. From its founding the journal has been publicly issued and sold through the national postal subscription system, which is how most Chinese literary journals of its generation reached readers outside their home province.

Registration, Frequency and Distribution

The bibliographic identity of Shidai Wenxue is fixed by its two serial numbers. Its international standard serial number is ISSN 1005-4677, and its Chinese domestic unified serial number is CN 37-1173/I, in which the prefix 37 is the code for Shandong province and the suffix I denotes the literature category in the Chinese periodical classification. The journal is a bimonthly, publishing six issues a year, and it is distributed nationally through the postal system under the distribution code 24-84, the code a subscriber quotes at a post office to order it. Directory listings give an annual subscription price of 249.60 yuan. At points in its history the journal has also appeared in split upper-half-month and lower-half-month editions; a 2011 issue is cited in scholarly databases as Shidai Wenxue, upper-half-month edition (Shidai Wenxue · Shangbanyue), issue 7 of that year, a format Chinese literary journals have used to accommodate larger volumes of submissions. The journal is classified in directories as a provincial-level periodical, the standard grade for a journal run by a provincial association rather than by a national body or a university.

Columns and Contents

The journal's standing columns give a clear picture of its editorial design. Its named sections include Shidai Shitan, the "Poetry Forum of the Times," which carries verse; Shidai Luntan, the "Forum of the Times"; and Wenlun Guangjiao, "Wide Angle on Literary Theory," devoted to critical and theoretical writing. Across these and its general pages the journal publishes a consistent mix of forms: reportage and documentary literature, novellas and short stories, poetry, and literary criticism and theory. That combination is the classic profile of a Chinese writers-association literary journal, which is expected to do two jobs at once: to present new creative work, especially fiction and poetry, and to host the critical conversation about that work. The presence of a dedicated theory column distinguishes Shidai Wenxue from purely creative magazines and aligns it with the many provincial journals that also serve university-based literary scholars, who publish criticism and research articles in its pages. Directory descriptions of the journal note that its editorial quality and standards rose steadily after its founding, and that its column structure was designed to cover the full range from creative writing to scholarship.

Scholarly and Critical Writing in Its Pages

Evidence of the journal's critical function can be seen in the scholarship it has carried. In 2011, for example, the upper-half-month edition of Shidai Wenxue published Wang Chunlin's extended study "Realist Concern and Historical Narrative," an analysis of the fiction of Liu Xinglong, the Hubei novelist who won the Mao Dun Literature Prize that same year. The article, which traces three phases in Liu's writing from his early imaginative work through his realist turn to the synthesis of his later novels, is the kind of substantial author study that Chinese literary journals publish as part of the continuing critical assessment of contemporary fiction. The fact that a Shandong journal devoted that space to a Hubei writer also illustrates how provincial association journals operate nationally: their criticism pages are not limited to local authors but participate in the countrywide discussion of Chinese literature. Studies first published in journals of this kind are routinely gathered into the citation databases used by scholars of modern Chinese literature, giving the journal's critical contents a long afterlife in academic work.

Submission and Review Practices

Shidai Wenxue's published submission rules show how a journal of its type manages the flow of manuscripts. The journal states an expected review period of about one month. Its rules ask that articles have a clear argument, substantial content and concise language; that quotations be documented through footnotes or endnotes giving the source, author, page numbers, publisher and place of publication; and that an author's biography appear as a footnote on the first page in a set order — name, year of birth, gender and ethnicity, native place, work unit and post, professional title, degree, academic record and research direction. Articles arising from funded research projects, whether national social-science funds or provincial, ministerial or institutional grants, are to be marked with the project's name and number. The journal's undertaking to authors is time-limited: if a contributor has received no acceptance notice within a month of submission, the manuscript may be placed elsewhere, and the journal does not undertake to comment on work it does not accept. These conventions, standard across Chinese literary and academic periodicals, make the journal legible to the two constituencies that supply it: creative writers and university-based critics.

Place Among Shandong's Literary Journals

Within Shandong itself, Shidai Wenxue is the younger of the province's two recognised literary periodicals. The senior title, Shandong Wenxue (Shandong Literature), traces its origins to 1950 and carries the weight of the province's earlier literary establishment. Shidai Wenxue, arriving in 1989, gave the Shandong Writers Association a second platform with a different emphasis, signalled in its very name: where the older journal is named for the province, the newer one is named for the times, and its columns are framed around contemporaneity — the poetry of the times, the forum of the times. The two journals are separate publications with separate serial registrations, and the existence of both reflects the scale of Shandong's literary output, which has historically been among the largest of any Chinese province. For contributors, the pair offers a choice between an established provincial flagship and a journal whose identity is built around current writing and criticism; for readers and librarians, they are complementary records of the province's literature across the reform era and after.

The Writers-Association Journal System

To understand Shidai Wenxue it helps to understand the system it belongs to. Since the 1950s, and again after the revival of literary publishing in the late 1970s, China's writers associations at national and provincial level have sponsored literary journals as their official organs. Chinese Social Sciences Net, the portal of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, has described literary newspapers and journals as the major carrier and form of dissemination of Chinese contemporary literature, bearing witness to its development and preserving primary materials for research. Provincial journals like Shidai Wenxue are the base of that pyramid: they discover and print new writers from their provinces, reprint-worthy work is then picked up by national selection journals, and the criticism they publish forms part of the scholarly record. A bimonthly founded in 1989 that still operates under its association's sponsorship sits squarely in this tradition, and its longevity — more than three decades of continuous publication — is itself a marker of institutional stability in a period when many Chinese literary journals contracted, merged or closed under market pressure.

Readership and Contributors

The journal's readership follows from its contents. Its fiction and poetry address the general literary readership that provincial journals have traditionally served: subscribers reached through the postal system, public and university libraries that hold Chinese literary periodicals, and the community of writers watching where new work appears. Its criticism and theory pages address a second, overlapping readership of literary scholars and postgraduate students, for whom journals of this grade are a recognised venue for research on contemporary Chinese literature. Contributors documented in the journal's pages range across both groups, from creative writers submitting novellas, stories and poems to academics submitting documented critical articles prepared to the journal's citation standards. The directory assessment that the journal enjoys wide influence nationally should be read in that light: a provincial literary bimonthly cannot compete in visibility with China's largest national magazines, but within the association journal system and the academic study of contemporary literature, a Shandong title founded in 1989 with a stable column structure and a documented record of substantial criticism has a durable, if specialised, presence.

Assessment

Shidai Wenxue is a representative example of the second-generation provincial literary journal in China: founded by a provincial writers association in 1989, registered as ISSN 1005-4677 and CN 37-1173/I, published bimonthly from Jinan with national postal distribution, and organised around columns for poetry, forum discussion and literary theory alongside its fiction and reportage. Its sponsorship by the Shandong Writers Association, its distinction from the older Shandong Wenxue, its submission and review conventions, and the substantial criticism attested in its pages are the verifiable core of its identity. For a directory of world media, its significance lies in what it documents about how Chinese literature is institutionally produced: not only in Beijing's national magazines, but in provincial association journals such as this one, which have quietly carried new writing and its criticism, issue by issue, for more than thirty years.