eprintid: 14078
rev_number: 5
eprint_status: archive
userid: 192
dir: disk0/00/01/40/78
datestamp: 2012-11-27 11:42:26
lastmod: 2024-07-17 15:58:22
status_changed: 2012-11-27 13:39:27
type: article
metadata_visibility: show
creators_name: Henningsen, Lena
title: Coffee, Fast Food, and the Desire for Romantic Love in Contemporary China: Branding and Marketing Trends in Popular Chinese-Language Literature
ispublished: pub
subjects: ddc-950
divisions: i-719000
keywords: Chinese Studies; Cultural Studies, Cai Zhiheng; The First Intimate Touch; Fast Food; Coffee; Experience; Imagination; Desire; Zhuang Yu; xiaozi; Petty
abstract: A popular, 1999 Taiwanese novel published for the Chinese book market set off a twofold transcultural trend: one in real life and one in literature. To explore this phenomenon, this paper considers the rising popularity of coffee culture and of “Western” food culture, as well as the increasingly important role that consumption and brand names play in popular literature on the Chinese mainland. I argue that desire, the power of imagination, and the transcultural qualities of the products in question constitute the crucial links between the two trends. Like other cultural products, such as lifestyle magazines, guidebooks, and movies, literary texts (especially successful ones) not only explain to consumers how to integrate new objects of consumption into their daily lives. They also provide ways of bestowing meaning on new forms of consumption and experience. Cultural products call upon consumers to fulfil their desires through imagination. The products concerned all have a global dimension, but are also firmly rooted in the Chinese reality. This gives them a certain vagueness and, at the same time, distinct meanings that render them particularly convenient for meeting the desires of a well-off, fashionable, cosmopolitan, and lifestyle-oriented part of the urban Chinese population: the xiaozi (petty bourgeois).
date: 2011
date_type: published
id_scheme: ojs
official_url: https://journals.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/index.php/transcultural/article/view/9089
ppn_swb: 1446100006
own_urn: urn:nbn:de:bsz:16-heidok-140783
language: eng
bibsort: HENNINGSENCOFFEEFAST2011
full_text_status: none
publication: Transcultural Studies
volume: 2
pagerange: 232-270
citation:   Henningsen, Lena  (2011) Coffee, Fast Food, and the Desire for Romantic Love in Contemporary China: Branding and Marketing Trends in Popular Chinese-Language Literature.  Transcultural Studies, 2.  pp. 232-270.