"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...