![]() ![]() ![]() Filmmakers, artists, musicians, and writers all try to come to terms with the changes of their city. How do the protagonists negotiate their identity in Shanghai’s fastchanging cityscape that is moving towards a high capitalist mode? And how does this negotiation intersect with gender? Being subsumed by the ideologised space, do the protagonists merely behave as uncritical consumers whose lives are determined by fleeting coincidental events and thrills, or do they still act as self-determining agents? How do they deal with questions on moral agency? Are sex and consumption ends in themselves, or do the protagonists use sex and consumption as a means to the end of self-expression and/or searching the self? Before addressing these questions, however, I will first briefly discuss the promotion and reception of Shanghai Baby and Sandbed, and then contextualise the novels’ portrayal of the city as sexualised space in Shanghai’s literary tradition, in which the trope of Shanghai as a seductive femme fatale is a recurrent trait.Ĭhina is urbanizing at an unprecedented speed. Taking Wei Hui's Shanghai Baby and Ge Hongbing's Sandbed as paradigms of the society of the spectacle, this chapter will scrutinise the tensions imposed on the individual by this society. Andrew David Field, Duke Kunshan University Shanghai Literary Imaginings is an admirable feat of organization, analysis, translation, and interpretation, bringing to light a large body of work that would otherwise lie buried, at least in the western world of Chinese studies.Michel Hockx, SOAS, University of London Its truly interdisciplinary approach makes Shanghai Literary Imaginings stand out from other books that comment on contemporary Chinese city life. ![]() Shanghai Literary Imaginings offers significant new insights into contemporary Chinese urban culture from a highly innovative methodological perspective.Robin Visser, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Shanghai Literary Imaginings is essential reading on turn-of-the-millennium Shanghai literary culture. She evokes lived experiences of the city via literary and cultural analysis informed by field research on influential authors, their texts and their public reception. Lena Scheen writes a lucid and compelling account of literature written amidst Shanghai’s sweeping transformations from 1990-2010. ![]()
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