| dc.description.abstract | Tanitigraph, known as the popular entertainment magazine, was famous for its rich visual content. It was the monthly supplement published from 1930 to 1937 by Taiwan Daily News, which was the newspaper with the largest circulation during Japanese colonial period. Tanitigraph has published a great number of contents about sports, and the decade of the 1930s was also the period when the development of Taiwanese sports reached at its peak. With a comprehensive inquiry into the economic situation, cultural trends, and body culture at that time, this thesis aims to investigate the relationship between society and sports in Taiwanese news media through the contents of baseball and swimming, including photography, comics, novels, editorials, and advertisements.
This thesis is divided into five chapters. Chapter 1 confirms the role of Tanitigraph as a supplement to boost newspaper sales by attracting readers with visual images and entertainment content. In chapter 2, with an overview of the sports content in Tanitigraph, I discover that sports were visualized and assimilated into daily life, instead of being just a physical action. And according to the statistics of the content, it showed that baseball and swimming were two of the most covered subjects. Chapter 3 discusses the circumstances under which the baseball was seen as a symbol of “sports times” (supōtsu jidai) by Tanitigraph. And the readers got to experience a spectacular baseball events by reading the magazine. Chapter 4 explores the relations between the baseball and the popular culture “erotic, grotesque, nonsense” (ero-guro-nonsensu), and extends the discussion to examine the phenomenon which sports became the legitimate way of gazing at and consuming the body in the public. Chapter 5 addresses from the perspective of the photographs of people in swimming suits, which reflected the complex attitudes about body images during that period. However, even though the editors presented the adult swimmers on the beach conservatively, the numerous western women’s body images not only became the target for people to consider the concept of ideal body image, but also combined the aesthetic of “healthy beauty”, in order to promote the concept of health. | en_US |