Mao, Jian, “New sensations in Shanghai literature and cinema in the 1930s and 1940s” (2002)

Title : “New sensations in Shanghai literature and cinema in the 1930s and 1940s”

Author(s) : Mao, Jian

Year : 2002

Type : Dissertation

Subject : History

Keywords : culture

University : Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Language:Name : Chinese

Support : Print

Abstract : By analyzing the new urban discourses that take shape in the thirties and forties, this study tries to explore the figuration and transformation of the “new urban sensations”. The first chapter focuses on how the concept of “health” becomes a rising idea in the thirties and one of the requirements of being modern. Second Chapter discusses the relationship between the ideology of the left wing, the face of Jin Yan and the body of Ruan Lingyu. Third Chapter probes into the new sensations expressed through “things” like “cinema” and “telephone”, and defines the characteristics of Shanghai Space Time of being discursive and neurotic. Fourth Chapter puts forward the idea of “two Shanghais” by comparing the experiences of Shanghai local people and that of the countrymen in the same city. The concluding chapter discusses the relationship between Shanghai and rural China, and describes the fate of “Shanghai ideology” after the Sino-Japanese War.