Mapping Modern Beijing
Space, Emotion, Literary Topography
Weijie Song
Reviews and Awards
"[Weijie Song] is engaging brilliantly in what I would call spatial reading... this book is of great value to the evolving study of modern and contemporary Chinese culture, particularly in responding to recent emphases on global and cosmopolitan perspectives and intercultural interactions, but also in creating a context in which to showcase major cultural figures who have not necessarily gotten the attention they deserve." -- Charles A. Laughlin, Weedon Professor of East Asian Studies at the University of Virginia, Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature
"The careful treatments of these cities and people's relationships with them make Shadow Modernism and Mapping Modern Beijing eminently rewarding reads. They shed new light on much familiar material while unearthing work that has escaped the attention of scholars to date. They also underscore why it is that these two cities, like a handful of other "world cities," have persisted as motors of cultural change down to the present. Both books are remarkable contributions and deserve close attention from historians, geographers, and urbanists well beyond the field of Chinese studies." --Max D. Woodworth, Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review
"Mapping Modern Beijing illustrates how China's old capital, with its seemingly ineffable vistas, flavors, and sounds, was turned into text. Imbued with literary sensibility and often as lyrical as the texts it examines, Weijie Song's book outlines the process through which literature has taken over as a virtual topography. In a grand sweep through many and varied works from the first half of the twentieth century, Mapping Modern Beijing demonstrates how literature serves as both a record of everyday experience and a vehicle for ideology. Song teases out the implications for nationalism, colonialism, diaspora, Sinophone culture, modernity, and historical trauma. The book should be read by all interested in understanding how texts can have spatial qualities." --Yomi Braester, Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor in the Humanities, University of Washington
"Mapping Modern Beijing offers the most comprehensive analysis of this palimpsestic Old Capital's literary topography. Weijie Song admirably renders visible what is often invisible, treating readers with a vivid display of competing visions, variegated spaces, turbid emotions, and layered meanings produced by Beijing natives, visitors, and foreigners. A timely addition to scholarship on modern literary and urban studies." --Yingjin Zhang, Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and Chinese Studies, University of California, San Diego
"Unlike shopworn images of Beijing as China's political center, this book makes the ancient city a dear neighborhood and home. By masterfully combining literary studies with urban space analysis, Weijie Song paints a picture of Beijing that is forever old and young-a Beijing brimming with emotion and aura, rooted in folkways and memories, and baptized in political and cultural transformations." --Ban Wang, William Haas Professor in Chinese Studies, Stanford University
"Mapping Modern Beijing makes a unique contribution to the study of Chinese urban culture from the first half of the twentieth century. Weijie Song is the first Anglophone scholar to present a book-length 'literary topography' of the modern city of Beijing. The range of voices and the range of emotions about the city resurrected by Song in his analysis is very large indeed, and as in his earlier work on Jin Yong he succeeds in applying methods of literary analysis and close reading both to canonical works of 'high literature' and to works considered part of 'popular fiction.'" --Michel Hockx, Professor and Director of the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies, University of Notre Dame
