曖昧的文學現代性 : 以1920年代《紅玫瑰》為中心

Abstract

Published by the World Publishing House, The Red Rose magazine was a star in the print industry of Shanghai from 1924 to 1931. Recently many popular periodicals in the Republican era have captured the interest of literary scholars, for example like the shorter-lived magazine Saturday in the early 1920s. Nevertheless, why was The Red Rose so well-received by the public? How can it be evaluated in the literary history? This thesis attempts to answer these questions under a thematic investigation of The Red Rose. Female figures as emblems of urban desire make up one of the rich significations of everyday life and place. The construction of the half-modern, half-traditional female image crystallizes the “Red Rose” writers’ ambivalent cultural attitude. Also, the magazine’s sensitivity towards the formation and transformation of a new modern public space in Shanghai exemplifies the print media’s role in the production of an urban imagination. Meanwhile, the magazine effectively employs visual media and demonstrates many inter-textual experiments between films and the popular literature. In the past popular magazines have only been used as documents to reflect the petty urbanites’ mentalities, or as supplementary materials to the canonized literary history, as they were produced in mass quantity and cannot be placed under the aesthetic scrutiny. Yet after careful examination, some texts have been rescued from oblivion, and serve as a convincing argument for the connection between the popular magazine, the neo-sensationalism school in the 1930s and the later legendary Shanghai writer Aileen Zhang.

Date of Award	2014
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology