Description
Book SynopsisExplores the Shanghai entertainment world at the close of the Qing dynasty. With illustrations from newspapers, novels, travel guides, and postcards, as well as written descriptions of life in Shanghai, this study traces the influences among courtesans, intellectuals, and the city itself in creating a market-oriented leisure culture in China.
Trade Review"In this meticulously researched and beautifully illustrated book, Catherine Yeh celebrates the centrality of the elite courtesan in the transformation of Shanghai to a modern metropolis. Although books about Shanghai abound..Yeh's book is unique in its approach. Shanghai Love is an important contribution to Chinese urban and media history. Readers will profit from Catherine Yeh's insightful analysis of the literature and visual culture that helped fashion this important metropolis in the nineteenth century."
* China Review International *
"Shanghai Love argues for the centrality of elite courtesans to the late Qing Shanghai entertainment industry, to the development of the city more generally, and even more broadly, to the enterprise of 'Chinese modernity' . . . [and] give[s] us a rich sense of the variety and complexity of the techniques and tropes through which the myth of the Shanghai courtesan is constructed . . . . Shanghai Love makes an important contribution to the study of urban history, literature, gender, and visual culture in the late Qing and Republican eras."
* The Journal of Asian Studies *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction
1. Modeling the Modern: Courtesan Fashion, Furniture, and Manners in Late-Nineteenth-Century Shanghai
2. Shanghai Love: New Rules of the Game
3. Playground Shanghai: Reenacting Dream of the Red Chamber
4. Image Makers: The Settlements' Men of Letters and Shanghai Print Entertainment
5. The Public Flower of the City and the Media Star
6. The Image of the Shanghai Courtesan in Late Qing Illustrated Fiction
7. Guides to Paradise: Entertainment in the Formation of Shanghai's Identity
8. Conclusion
Notes
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
