The first, Hai Alai Scenes by Hei Ying, features a married man who spends his nights at the hai alai fronton or arena, hoping to leave with a win under his belt. While Intoxicating Shanghai is an academic book-many of the pages contain more footnotes than text-the non-specialist will enjoy four newly translated stories from two pictorial magazines that enjoyed a short lifespan around Bevan’s timeframe of 1934-35, Wenyi and Wanxiang, that have not before been published in English. They wrote about jazz, dance halls, cinema, hai alai, and the latest women’s fashions. ‘Intoxicating Shanghai’ – An Urban Montage: Art and Literature in Pictorial Magazines during Shanghai’s Jazz Age, Paul Bevan (Brill, April 2020) …to explore new ways of seeing, hearing and feeling to express things in ways that had not been possible before to perceive things in fresh and new ways, an approach to the writing of fiction that had been all but perfected by Mu Shiying and was closely imitated by Hei Ying. According to Bevan, New-sensationalists aimed The book intentionally breaks with common academic conventions in order to present these diverse topics in ways that are somewhat closer to how they might have been enjoyed by readers of pictorial magazines in the 1930s.īesides Mu Shiying and Hei Ying, their New-sensationalist colleagues included Ye Lingfeng and Liu Na’ou. Should perhaps be seen as a montage in its own right, focusing as it does on a number of different areas of enquiry: literature, art, cinema and music, and presenting them in a deliberately fragmented way. Bevan structures his book around the years 19 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. Often dismissed as low brow, Paul Bevan argues in his new book, “Intoxicating Shanghai”-An Urban Montage that these magazines and the so-called New-sensationalists brought literature to people who wouldn’t have otherwise read the more literary journals available then. Writer and editor Mu Shiying declared 1934 the Year of the Magazine, marking a dramatic rise in Chinese pictorial magazines, modeled on American publications like Life and Vanity Fair.
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