Revisiting the Imagined Spaces of Shanghai with Yingjin Zhang

Abstract

In honor of Yingjin Zhang, this essay revisits one chapter of his first book, The City in Modern Literature and Film: Configurations of Space, Time, and Gender (1996). The chapter on women writers who depict their experiences in the urban environs of Beijing and Shanghai was the first to thoroughly highlight the work of a wide range of women writers in a full-blown way and had a strong impression on the author of this essay. In commemoration of Zhang and his scholarly contributions, Lupke revisits the short works of three women featured in this chapter, Chen Ying, Su Qing, and Zhang Ailing, all based in Shanghai, and engages in a final, albeit imagined, riposte and farewell to the author of this book who has inspired thoughtful engagement and has mentored many students over the past twenty-five years.

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Notes on contributors

Christopher Lupke

Christopher Lupke, PhD, Cornell University, is Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta. A scholar of modern and contemporary Chinese literature and cinema, his books include The Sinophone Cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien: Culture, Style, Voice, and Motion and a translation of Ye Shitao’s monumental work, A History of Taiwan Literature, which won the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize from the Modern Language Association for the translation of a scholarly book. Christopher Lupke has edited or coedited five books and five special journal issues, and is the recipient of the Michael Delahoyde Award for Distinguished Editing. His articles have appeared in the Journal of Asian Studies, boundary 2, Comparative Literature Studies, Modern Chinese Literature, and numerous other publications. Lupke’s current research project is a book-length study of the Confucian notion of “filiality” in contemporary Chinese and Sinophone fiction.