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The City in Modern Chinese Literature and Film: Configurations of Space, Time, and Gender. By YINGJIN ZHANG. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996. xix, 390 pp. $45.00 (cloth).
Ever since the explosive growth of cities in the West from the middle of the nineteenth century, social theorists such as Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Georg Simmel, and the Chicago sociologists have found the city to be an indispensable part in developing their social theories. Although some may think that the importance of the city is shrinking due to the transnational and transregional flow of ideas, goods, images, and people, the city is, to the contrary, among the most recurrent themes in "postmodern" cultural theories. From the Birmingham school to Walter Benjamin, from Roland Barthes to Fredric Jameson, the city has reemerged as an important site out of which the issues of ideology, class, hegemony, negotiation, nationalism, popular culture, and postmodernity arise.
Yingjin Zhang's book-length study of the city as represented in modern Chinese literature and film can be squarely placed in the above intellectual context. That the author is conversant in a wide variety of contemporary literary and cultural theories is readily apparent. The immediate advantage of choosing the city as an organizing theme is that the author can escape the rigidity of conventional periodization which labels twentieth-century Chinese culture "early modern" (jindai ), "modern" (xiandai), and "contemporary" (dangdai). Zhang's perceptive analysis of a huge bulk of literary and filmic materials includes not only Han Bangqing's Haishang hua liezhuan (Profiles of Blossoms in Shanghai, 1892) and Zhongyuan Langzi's Jinghua yanshi (Amorous Stories of Beijing, 1905), but also some distinctive features of post-Mao literature and film, which are legitimately investigated as part of a culturally coherent whole that further illuminates the issue of the city and its literary and filmic discourses. A somewhat latent yet more...