The Urban Experience In The Semi-Colonial Context

As an important writer of Neo-Sensationalism, Mu Shiying in his novels presents us with a unique and rich urban experience, which is subject to the historical and cultural context of the semi-colonial Shanghai. In the environment of semi-colonial culture, Mu Shiying reflects and analyzes the modern individuals from a westernized or a cosmopolitan culture perspective, and provides us with a literary landscape of urban experience of a different kind.Through the use of montage and other modern techniques, Mu Shiying’s novels first presents people with a visual sense of vertigo, and this at a deeper level corresponds to the mental vertigo of the people living in the semi-colonial society.The leisure class living in desire and high rate experience the sense of alienation; the ordinary workers of the lower class with desires dilapidated feel great oppression; and the tramps living in the bottom of the city suffer the sense of exile in their belief of freedom and actions of madness--all above have expressed the decline and anxiety of the people living in the semi-colonial society where the physical bodies exist but the souls stay nowhere, and also have expressed the sense of alienation between people and the city.Mu Shiying’s women characters are characterized with materialization and the physical bodies of the modern women are materialized as a label of urban fashion culture, which is in depth a metaphor of people’s self-lost in the world of materialized urban women or in the urban landscape. Meanwhile, Mu Shiying also depicts an urban experience of tender or even pure feelings in the materialized urban world,delineates the tender or pure urban women bringing people mental comfort and purification of the soul with their beautiful physical bodies and kind hearts, and these convey a warm and divine experience, and also show people another side of the connotation of urban people’s humanity.In the historical context of the semi-colonial Shanghai, the“enlightenment/revolution” caused by the reality of the Western aggression and colonization is an unavoidable fact. The appearance of the left-wing literature has the purport to resist the Western colonial rule. Mu Shiying maintains a vigilant and alert attitude to the passion and clamor of the left-wing literature, and questions the traditional “enlightenment/revolution” knowledge paradigm in the form of literary writing, thus, he expresses an introspective urban experience of the independent intellectuals.