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Cosmopolitan
Publics
Price: $39.95
Subtitle: Anglophone Print
Culture in Semi-Colonial Shanghai
Author:
Shuang Shen
Subject: Asian
American Studies, Literary
Studies
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-4542-4
Pages: 204 pages, 10
illustrations
Publication Date: March 2009
Praise for Cosmopolitan Publics
"As the first of its
kind, this groundbreaking book provides a rare perspective from which
to view the multivalent (and multilingual) dimensions of China's search
for modernity in the cultural sphere and showcases a phenomenon
hitherto overlooked by Chinese cultural and literary historians."—David Wang,
Harvard University
Description:
Early
twentieth-century China paired the local community to the world—a place
and
time when English dominated urban-centered higher and secondary
education and
Chinese-edited English-language magazines surfaced as a new form of
translingual
practice.
Cosmopolitan
Publics focuses on China’s “cosmopolitans”—Western-educated
intellectuals who returned to Shanghai in the late 1920s to publish in
English and who, ultimately, became both cultural translators and
citizens of the wider world. Shuang Shen highlights their work in
publications such as The China Critic
and T’ien Hsia, providing
readers with a broader understanding of the role and function of
cultural mixing, translation, and multilingualism in China’s cultural
modernity.
Decades later, as nationalist biases and political restrictions emerged
within China,
the influence of the cosmopolitans was neglected and the significance
of cosmopolitan
practice was underplayed. Shen’s encompassing study revisits and
presents the experience of Chinese modernity as far more heterogeneous,
emergent, and transnational than it has been characterized until now.
About the Authors:
Shuang
Shen has been a faculty member of the City University of New
York and Rutgers University, and currently teaches at Lingnan
University in Hong Kong. She has published in both English- and
Chinese-language journals and newspapers.
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Price: $39.95
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