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Mu Shiying: China’s Lost Modernist
Current price:
$20.00
Publication Date: March 18th, 2014
Publisher:
Hong Kong University Press
ISBN:
9789888208142
Pages:
188
Description
Shanghai’s “Literary Comet” 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 the city’s Jazz-Age nightlife. Mu’s highly original stream-of-consciousness approach to short story writing deserves to be re-examined and re-read. As Andrew Field argues, Mu advanced modern Chinese writing beyond the vernacular expression of May Fourth giants Lu Xun and Lao She to reveal even more starkly the alienation of a city trapped between the forces of civilization and barbarism in the 1930s. Mu Shiying China’s Lost Modernist includes translations of six short stories, four of which have not appeared before in English. Each story focuses on Mu’s key obsessions the pleasurable yet anxiety-ridden social and sexual relationships in the modern city, and the decadent maelstrom of consumption and leisure epitomized by the dance hall and nightclub. In his introduction, Field situates Mu’s work within the transnational and hedonistic environment of inter-war Shanghai, the city’s entertainment economy, as well as his place within the wider arena of Jazz-Age literature from Berlin, Paris, Tokyo and New York.
Praise for Mu Shiying: China’s Lost Modernist
“Mu Shiying is a legendary figure of 1930s Shanghai. His dazzling chronicle of modern Shanghai gave rise to Chinese modernist literature. His meteoric career as a writer, a flâneur, and allegedly a double agent testifies to cosmopolitanism at its most fla
“Mu Shiying was one of China’s pioneer modernists, and his stories are full of inventive touches, including his own experimental technique of stream-of-consciousness, that evoke the emergent splendour of urban decadence of Shanghai in the 1930s. This Engl
“During his short, tumultuous life, Mu Shiying produced a small oeuvre of remarkable short stories that stand out in the wider context of modern Chinese literature. He captures the essence of the Shanghai jazz age with his racy, musical, and often fragmen
“Mu’s stories give readers a glimpse into the lively and vibrant, yet sometimes empty and soulless life in Shanghai during the early 1930s.” —Asian Review of Books, 26 May 2014
“Field is a careful translator who clearly strives for a compromise among readability, faithfulness, and completeness. [… His] volume is a most welcome contribution to the canon of Republican-era literature in translation. It will not only heighten our ap
