The Voice Of The City: Wenming Xi And Urban Culture In Early Twenty Century Shanghai

Using the Civilized Drama (Wenming Xi) as a case study, this dissertation tries to examine the leisure life and the transformation of social culture at the beginning of the Republic. Many historians still view entertainment as frills rather than the substance of culture reorientation. However, for the urban resident, leisure life in the early years of the twentieth century came to include more than entertainment; it became a public social life outside the cloistered walls of home and business, and it brought diverse elements of the urban landscape into the same social arena. The evolution of leisure life and amusement institutions forms the critical element in the changing of ideology and society from 1900 to 1924. There appears obvious periodalization according to the survey of amusement advertisements in Shen Daily and News Daily.Most historians see the thirties as a culmination and look the twenties as a beginning. But this is not true. We should rather view the twenties as a culmination and should not ignore the function of Late Qing Empire in the development of popular culture. The growth of public leisure life starting in the Late Qing Empire accompanied the decline of Confucianism. Many changes in leisure life institutions and entertainment over the course of the first twenties years of the twentieth century mirrored the transformation of social and cultural attitudes and behavior.Progressive and conservative critics tried to uplift the New Drama as a tool of education. When the New Drama was commercialized and changed into Wenming Xi, they began to attack it. To their tastes, Wenming Xi was too informal and too relaxed, exercising little control over the personality and care little about the nationalism. They wanted pubic life to refine individual character and mirror the prospect of the nation/state. The struggle between popular culture and high culture (or mass culture and elite culture), and the emergence of cultural hierarchy after the New Culture Movement, are crucial to understanding why Wenming Xi lost its reputation.There are no real boundaries between popular culture study and intellectual studies. As Professor Thomas Bender pointed out, "it is only when that internal history is brought into relations with external contingencies, including place, economy, social relations, and politics, that one begins to write an urban history of culture." In the field of cultural history, the divide between popular culture and high culture is sharper and sharper. However, in the book Highbrow/lowbrow:The Emergence of Culture Hierarchy in American, the author assays that high culture cannot be adequately studied outside the complex patterns of relation to more popular forms of culture, what's more, high and popular, sacralized and commercial, elite and more general culture forms are deeply entangled with each other in ways that mutually define them and that establish their metropolitan identity and role. Wenming Xi is a perfect case that puts lots of importmant issues together.Amusement transferred from a private activity to a public event at the beginning of the twentieth century. Looking after their serious matters during the daytime, people enjoyed the city's pleasures during the evening. They brought their culture to the public, and then they returned home taking part of the city with them. Different culture mixed together in those public spaces and a new form of culture came into being. The restrictions placed on individuals were lessened. Greater emphasis was placed on self-fulfillment, self-expression rather the responsibility to state/nation.To define Wenming Xi is not easy. Until today, there is no accurate definition or a suitable evaluation about it. If we examine it from an approach of transnational history, we find that Wenming Xi is the voice of city, and the voice of modernity.Generally, this dissertation will mainly focus on three issues. The first, contrary to many researchers who look on Wenming Xi as the origin of Chinese Modern Drama and emphasize their relationship, this essay will explore its relationship with movie. The second, in the approach of social and cultural history, comparative history, we will study Wenming Xi in a more wide perspective and break the boundary of Japan-Chinese frame. The third, the flourishing of Wenming Xi was due to the development of women culture. Through examing the relation between them, we can survey issues about modernism.