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Can I read Mediasphere Shanghai: The Aesthetics of Cultural Production (Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University) on EtoBox?

Mediasphere Shanghai: The Aesthetics of Cultural Production (Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University) by Alexander Townsend Des Forges is a nonfiction available to read on EtoBox.

What is Mediasphere Shanghai: The Aesthetics of Cultural Production (Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University) about?

For many in the west, "Shanghai" is the quintessence of East Asian modernity, whether imagined as glamorous and exciting, corrupt and impoverishing, or a complex synthesis of the good, the bad, and the ugly. How did "Shanghai" acquire this power? How did people across China and around the world decide that Shanghai was the place to be? Mediasphere Shanghai shows that partial answers to these questions can be found in the products of Shanghai’s media industry, particularly the Shanghai novel, a distinctive genre of installment fiction that flourished from the 1890s to the 1930s. Shanghai fiction supplies not only the imagery that we now consider typical of the city, but, more significantly, the very forms—simultaneity, interruption, mediation, and excess—through which the city could be experienced as a business and entertainment center and envisioned as the focal point of a mediasphere with a national and transnational reach. Existing paradigms of Shanghai culture tend to explain the city’s distinctive literary and visual aesthetics as merely the predictable result of economic conditions and social processes, but Alexander Des Forges maintains that literary texts and other cultural

Who reads Mediasphere Shanghai: The Aesthetics of Cultural Production (Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University)?

It is typically read by self-directed learners exploring a subject in depth.

Common subject areas: history, science, philosophy, social sciences.

Author
Alexander Townsend Des Forges
Publisher
Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press
Published
2007
Language
EN
ISBN
9780824830816
Category
nonfiction
Subjects
Literary Criticism, Art, History

Other editions & translations

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