The Lure of the Modern

"Quite apart from her contributions as a literary critic, Shu-mei Shih is able to historicize literary developments of the period most persuasively. Her analysis of Shanghai, the city, and the literary movement it spawned, is crafted with great sensitivity to both history and literature. In many ways, it is the most inclusive historical study of modern Chinese literature in its formative period."—Prasenjit Duara, author of Rescuing History from the Nation "Tracing the spectral production of 'Chinese' identity as it is disseminated globally, Shih boldly moves away from using place (ethnicity) and the body (race) to anchor Chinese identity, to argue that the visual (film) and the verbal (language and linguistics) are the most salient ones in the modern and contemporary historical formation. She succeeds brilliantly."—David Palumbo-Liu, author of Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier "This is the most thoroughly researched study of Chinese modernism published to date. The author's theoretical interventions greatly enrich our understanding of colonial modernity and the stakes of comparison in cross-cultural studies. The book is a major contribution to modern Chinese literary studies and comparative literature."—Lydia Liu, editor of Tokens of Exchange