MCLC: new book on Shanghai

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: new book on Shanghai
***********************************************************

List members might be interested in this new publication.

Kirk

===========================================================

Space, Gender, and Visual Culture in the Sojourners' City, 1853-98
By Samuel Y. Liang

This book argues that modernity first arrived in late nineteenth-century
Shanghai via a new spatial configuration. This city¹s colonial capitalist
development ruptured the traditional configuration of self-contained
households, towns, and natural landscapes in a continuous spread,
producing a new set of fragmented as well as fluid spaces. In this
process, Chinese sojourners actively appropriated new concepts and
technology rather than passively responding to Western influences. Liang
maps the spatial and material existence of these transient people and
reconstructs a cultural geography that spreads from the interior to the
neighbourhood and public spaces.

In this book the author:

* discusses the courtesan house as a surrogate home and analyzes its
business, gender, and material configurations;
* examines a new type of residential neighbourhood and shows how its
innovative spatial arrangements transformed the traditional social order
and hierarchy;
* surveys a range of public spaces and highlights the mythic perceptions
of industrial marvels, the adaptations of colonial spatial types, the
emergence of an urban public, and the spatial fluidity between elites and
masses.

Through reading contemporaneous literary and visual sources, the book
charts a hybrid modern development that stands in contrast to the
positivist conception of modern progress. As such it will be a provocative
read for scholars of Chinese cultural and architectural history.

Reviews

"The great strength of this book is its focus on the spatial rather than
the temporal; Shanghai¹s urban spaces are brought vividly to life. The
book contributes greatly to our understanding of what modernity really
meant to the Chinese residents of Shanghai." - Jonathan Howlett: The China
Quarterly, December 2011

"Studies of modern Shanghai have disproportionately focused on the city in
the early twentieth century, particularly in the Republican era. Liang¹s
work is a welcome remedy to this obvious imbalance in the field. For its
glimpse of life in late nineteenth-century Shanghai and for its rethinking
of issues related to city, gender, and modernity, it will be a useful
handbook for historians and students of cultural studies." - HANCHAO LU,
Georgia Institute of Technology; The Journal of Asian Studies

Table of Contents

Introduction 1. Fluid Tradition, Splintered Modernity 2. The Convergence
of Writing and Commerce 3. Ephemeral Households, Marvelous Things 4. The
Meeting of Courtyard and Street 5. Ultimate Ingenuity, Amorphous Crowds 6.
The Mingling of Magnates and Masses Conclusion

Author Biography
Samuel Y. Liang is Assistant Professor of the Humanities at Utah Valley
University, USA May 2012 | Paperback: 978-0-415-63116-7: $44.95 $35.96 ­
£24.99 £19.99
For more information or online ordering, visit
www.routledge.com/9780415631167/ and enter discount code MRJ62 at the
checkout to claim your discount. Offer expires 31/12/2012.