Seventeenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

One of the most popular forms of consumerism in Vietnamese pre-modern literature is feuilletons. Published periodically on newspapers primarily and originally for commercial purposes, this special writing genre always attempts to catch up with contemporaneous reading taste, thus satisfying readers and increasing the newspaper’s circulation. In Vietnam, feuilletons seemingly appeared for the first time in 1897 and developed rapidly over the first seven decades of the twentieth century. Vietnamese pre-modern feuilletons were absolutely successful in attracting contemporary readers whose freedom to choose what to read was always respected. Nevertheless, taking full advantage of its universal impact on the majority, a Vietnamese feuilleton named Hà Hương phong nguyệt written by Lê Hoằng Mưu made a remarkable revolution: completely transforming the traditional and familiar rhythm of writing into a more modern one. This shift and how it both directly and indirectly reconstructed the reading identity of contemporaries and relocated Vietnamese discourse on what literary writing was is explored in this paper.