| This dissertation critiques the assumption that Chinese modernity was merely or mainly an import from the West. Modernity as such often consisted of superficial, progressive images imposed on a social framework that had shown remarkable resilience and historical continuity. This framework, exemplified by the neo-Confucian continuum of various social structures and spaces that unified the public and private spaces, the sacred and secular realms, and the rural and urban areas, was disrupted by the artificial order of modern cosmopolitan culture, which was emerging in late nineteenth-century Shanghai.; Based on this theoretical model outlined in the introductory chapter, the next four chapters seek to reinterpret the meanings of modernity by portraying and analyzing an imaginary social landscape in late nineteenth-century Shanghai as it was represented in the contemporary urban literature including periodicals, travel notes, guidebooks and fiction. Chapter 2 first discusses the historical tradition from which this literature was developed and its transformation in the foreign settlements after Western-style publishing mechanisms were introduced.; The courtesan house became the sojourners' surrogate "home," one which inherited and parodied the communal function of the traditional household lost to the sojourners. In Chapter 3, the dynamics of this "home" are understood primarily through a reading of Han Bangqing's novel Flowers of Shanghai (1894), and secondarily through nineteenth-century guidebooks and travel notes.; The rise of the courtesan house signified a changing notion of "home," as both a physical and social space, in metropolitan culture. Chapter 4 discusses the architectural and urban setting of this new "home."; Chapter 5 continues to explore similar spatial features on a larger scale by examining the dialectics of the artificial and the natural, the foreign and the indigenous, the public and the private as they were played out in the poetic and journalistic representations of the sojourners' experiences in public spaces such as the city's broad avenues, teahouses, shops, theaters and public gardens.; In sum, through a critical and intertextual reading of late ninetieth-century periodicals, travel notes, guidebooks, and fiction, this dissertation analyzes the sojourners' experiences in private and public space, diagnoses a modern development that was at once a reinvention of the lost ideals and an adjustment to the new industrial culture, and charts a new configuration of time, space and materiality that constitutes a modernity that stands in contrast to the positivist conception of the modern marked by linear progress. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
