Mapping Modern Beijing: Space, Emotion, Literary Topography

ISBN-13: 9780190200671 / Angielski / Twarda / 2017 / 320 str.

Weijie Song

Opis

"There is a Beijing in my heart, but I can't articulate it," wrote Lao She, the great Chinese writer, in 1936. Mapping Modern Beijing explores the various ways authors sought to understand and articulate this ancient capital, modern city, and socialist metropolis. Song investigates five modes of representing Beijing: as a warped hometown, a city of snapshots and manners, an aesthetic city, an imperial capital in comparative and cross-cultural perspective, and a displaced city on the Sinophone and diasporic postmemory. Drawing from literary canons to exotic narratives, from modernist poetry to chivalric fantasy, from popular culture to urban planning, this book explores the complex nexus of urban spaces, archives of emotions, and literary topography of Beijing in its long journey from imperial capital to Republican city and to socialist metropolis. While most English-language literary studies of China focus on its rural locales, Song's study presents a welcome departure, expanding our understandings of Chinese literature into the urban and the modern.

Recenzje

The careful treatments of these cities and people's relationships with them make Shadow Modernism and Mapping Modern Beijing eminently rewarding reads. They shed new light on much familiar material while unearthing work that has escaped the attention of scholars to date. They also underscore why it is that these two cities, like a handful of other "world cities", have persisted as motors of cultural change down to the present. Both books are remarkable contributions and deserve close attention from historians, geographers, and urbanists well beyond the field of Chinese Studies.

O autorze

Weijie Song is Associate Professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at Rutgers University.