Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930-1945 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930-1945 Yingjin Zhang (bio) Leo Ou-fan Lee . Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930-1945. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. 416 pp. Hardcover $49.95, ISBN 0-6748-0550-x. Paperback $24.95, ISBN 0-6748-0551-8. This book is a much-anticipated major publication in the field of Chinese studies. As a leading scholar of modern Chinese literature and culture since the 1970s, Leo Ou-fan Lee has been defining the research agendas on Lu Xun, fictional realism, and cultural modernity, and now Shanghai Modern has been released to enthusiastic acclaim.1 Wen-hsin Yeh regards it as "cultural history from inside out and from ground up," while Charles Taylor judges it to be "immensely rich in theoretical insights" (back cover). In many ways, Shanghai Modern is neither groundbreaking (for scholarship on Shanghai has increased spectacularly since the 1980s) nor definitive (for many claims remain tentative or speculative), but is rather a work that brings together the cutting-edge research on urban modernity while directing the reader to explore further avenues. The book contains a wealth of primary information and [End Page 430] critical insights on a wide spectrum of what is called the "Shanghai modern." To illustrate this fascinating spectrum, Lee takes his reader on a tour through architectural styles, department stores, coffee houses, dance halls, public parks, the race club, movie theaters, and residential buildings, as well as popular magazines, textbooks and repositories (wenku), print advertisements, calendar posters, modern pictorials, motion pictures, foreign books, and literary writers and their fictional characters. As if dictated by these fascinating topics, Lee's narrative appears to steer away from consistent high theorization, and its rich descriptions and observations thus appeal to a general readership as well as an academic one. Part 1, "The Background of Urban Culture," consists of four chapters that survey Shanghai urban space, the "enlightenment" role of print culture, the rise of film culture as a new urban phenomenon, and the discovery by Shanghai writers—through books and journals—of Western modernism as "a new literary fashion with which to defy established conventions in Chinese literature, both past and present" (p. 146). In his film chapter,2 Lee takes note of the physical structure of movie theaters, the institutionalization of film reviews and criticism, the questions of popular taste and "Chinese" film narrative, and the relation of cinema to the city, as well as his observations on film spectatorship and film audience. "If print culture served as a crucial aid in this process of appropriating visuality," he contends, "the popularity of this visual medium soon triggered a reversed process—of the visual entering into the written and of film providing the key source for fictional technique" (p. 119). What is particularly refreshing in Lee's survey are the hitherto neglected interactions between print culture and film culture in Shanghai. In part 2, "The Modern Literary Imagination: Writers and Texts," Lee offers readings of six representative modernists—Shi Zhecun, Liu Na'ou, Mu Shiying, Shao Xunmei, Ye Lingfeng, and Eileen Chang—in both (inter)textual and (inter)- contextual terms. The four chapters in this part represent his attempt to correct a standard practice in Chinese-Western comparative literature. As he argues, "Scholars doing 'influence studies' of Western authors or works on modern Chinese literature normally choose to ignore this material context of how works by Western authors, whether in book form or included in journals, were actually located, read, translated or rendered into Chinese in some fashion, and consequently assimilated by the Chinese writers into their writing" (p. 122). In other words, Lee emphasizes the importance of materiality in any concrete case of cultural trafficking. Part 3, "Reflections," presents two chapters that trace the demise of Shanghai cosmopolitanism and its later-day reincarnation in Hong Kong. In a rather cursory fashion, Lee inventories historical and cultural events since the late 1930s and proposes that we envision Hong Kong as the Other of Shanghai and Shanghai as the Other of Hong Kong. Eileen Chang, whose "ghostly" images are [End Page 431] featured prominently in the last two of...