‘Intoxicating Shanghai’ – An Urban Montage

Paul Bevan is Departmental Lecturer in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford. From 2018 to 2020, he was Christensen Fellow in Chinese painting at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. His first book, A Modern Miscellany, was published by Brill in 2015.

“Scholars of many disciplines have mined Shanghai’s vast trove of Republican-era pictorial magazines to explore that city’s vibrant cosmopolitan popular culture. Bevan’s Intoxicating Shanghai – An Urban Montage argues for attention to pictorial magazines as a medium in themselves and, specifically, “as a major vehicle for the dissemination of the products of ‘avant-garde’ and ‘high’ cultural circles in Shanghai during the 1930s… [T]hrough meticulous research, Bevan ties the contributors and contents of these two magazines into a rich and mutually resonant network of literary, artistic, cinematic and musical culture that helped define the 1930s as Shanghai’s cosmopolitan “jazz age.”… One can well argue that the resolutely empirical approach informing all of Intoxicating Shanghai is precisely what sets it apart from the other studies of Republican-era Shanghai.”- John A. Crespi, Colgate University, The China Quarterly, Vol. 255, 820-821."Bevan structures his book around the years 1934 and 1935 to highlight a Chinese art and literature scene that is often absent from English-language books that focus on a largely expat Shanghai based in and around the foreign presence [...] This brief stretch of the 1930s brings to mind the short bursts of world-class art and literature in post-2000 China. They sprouted up almost as quickly as they now seem to be disappearing. These examples can give us hope that literature and art, like hope, spring eternal." - Susan Blumberg-Kason, in: Asian Review of Books, 25 July 2020

• AcknowledgementsNote on the IllustrationsNote on CopyrightIllustrationsNotes on Romanization and ReferencesAbbreviationsPart 1: Introductory ChaptersSo This Is Shanghai!1 Literature and the Pictorial Magazine2 Art and the Pictorial MagazineStory One: ‘Huilixian’ 回力線 Hai Alai Scenes by Hei YingPart 2: Lu Xun: Art Aficionado and Critic3 Politics, Art and the Pictorial MagazineStory Two: ‘Luotuo Nicaizhuyizhe yu nüren’ 駱駝尼采主義者與女人 (Camel, Nietzscheanist and Woman) by Mu Shiying4 Two Critiques by Lu XunStory Three: ‘Molü shan de xiaojie’ 墨綠衫的小姐 (The Lady in the Inky-Green Cheongsam) by Mu ShiyingPart 3: The Rise and Rise of the Pictorial Magazine5 ‘The Year of the Magazine’, 19346 Manhua Artists and the Pictorial Magazine – Guo Jianying, Huang Miaozi and Ye QianyuStory Four: ‘Sharen weisui’ 殺人未遂 (Attempted Murder) by Liu Na’ouPart 4: The Shanghai Jazz Age7 Cinema, Literature and the Pictorial Magazine, 19348 Jazz and Popular Music in Shanghai’s DancehallsSuch is Shanghai!Appendix: Notes on Source MaterialBibliographyIndex