Shanghai modern : the flowering of a new urban culture in China, 1930-1945 / Leo Ou-fan Lee.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lee, Leo Ou-fan.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Popular culture--China--Shanghai.

Popular culture.

Shanghai (China)--Social life and customs.

Shanghai (China).

China--Civilization--1912-1949.

China.

Civilization.

Shanghai (China)--Social conditions--20th century.

Shanghai (China)--Economic conditions--20th century.

China--Shanghai.

Physical Description:

xvii, 409 pages, 26 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1999.

Summary:

In the midst of China's wild rush to modernize, a surprising note of reality arises: Shanghai. it seems, was once modern indeed, a pulsing center of commerce and art in the heart of the twentieth century. This book immerses us in the golden age of Shanghai urban culture, a modernity at once intrinsically Chinese and profoundly anomalous, blending new and indigenous ideas with those flooding into this "treaty port" from the Western world.

A preeminent specialist in Chinese studies, Leo Ou-fan Lee gives us a rare wide-angle view of Shanghai culture in the making. He shows us the architecture and urban spaces in which the new commercial culture flourished, then guides us through the publishing and filmmaking industries that nurtured a whole generation of artists and established a bold new style in urban life known as modeng. In the work of six writers of the time, particularly Shi Zhecun, Mu Shiying, and Eileen Chang, Lee discloses the reflection of Shanghai's urban landscape -- foreign and familiar, oppressive and seductive, traditional and innovative. This work acquires a broader historical and cosmopolitan context with a look at the cultural links between Shanghai and Hong Kong, a virtual genealogy of Chinese modernity from the 1930s to the present day.

Contents:

I The Background of Urban Culture

1 Remapping Shanghai 3

2 The Construction of Modernity in Print Culture 43

3 The Urban Milieu of Shanghai Cinema 82

4 Textual Transactions: Discovering Literary Modernism through Books and Journals 120

II The Modern Literary Imagination: Writers and Texts

5 The Erotic, the Fantastic, and the Uncanny: Shi Zhecun's Experimental Stories 153

6 Face, Body, and the City: The Fiction of Liu Na'ou and Mu Shiying 190

7 Decadent and Dandy: Shao Xunmei and Ye Lingfeng 232

8 Eileen Chang: Romances in a Fallen City 267

III Reflections

9 Shanghai Cosmopolitanism 307

10 Epilogue: A Tale of Two Cities 324.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 343-386) and index.

ISBN:

067480550X

0674805518

OCLC:

40354566