Mu Shiying: China′s Lost Modernist – New Translations and an Appreciation
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Hong Kong University Press
Published:1st Jul '14
Currently unavailable, currently targeted to be due back around 8th March 2025, but could change
When the avant-garde writer Mu Shiying was assassinated in 1940, China lost one of its greatest modernist writers while Shanghai lost its most detailed chronicler of its demi-monde nightlife. As Andrew David Field argues, Mu Shiying advanced modern Chinese writing beyond the vernacular expression of May 4 giants Lu Xun and Lao She to even more starkly reveal the alienation of the cosmopolitan-capitalist city of Shanghai, trapped between the forces of civilization and barbarism. Each of these five short stories focuses on the author's key obsessions: the pleasurable yet anxiety-ridden social and sexual relationships of the modern city and the decadent maelstrom of consumption and leisure in Shanghai epitomized by the dance hall and the nightclub. This study places his writings squarely within the framework of Shanghai's social and cultural nightscapes.
Better than that of any other writer, Mu Shiying's fiction encapsulates the cosmopolitan life of 1930s Shanghai (with its foreign concessions, cinemas, cafes and cabarets) that underlay modernist Chinese writing. Andrew Field's book is exciting not only because it is a new appreciation of this writer but because, through its translations of Mu's stories, it reveals the extent to which Shanghai-based writing was inspired by the styles of international modernism. -- Lynn Pan, author of Shanghai Style and Old Shanghai: Gangsters in Paradise A much-needed volume that will help considerably in making Mu's writing more widely accessible. -- Christopher Rosenmeier H-Asia
ISBN: 9789888208142
Dimensions: 179mm x 125mm x 12mm
Weight: 180g
160 pages