It is refreshing to read a study of the major cities of the Asian ‘Tiger’ economies from the perspective of literary studies rather than the social sciences. Jini Kim Watson's impressive first monograph provides an innovative analysis of twentieth-century fiction produced in Singapore, Seoul and Taipei, employing post-colonial theory. She argues that these ‘New Asian Cities’ (a term she borrows from architectural critic Jeffrey Kipnis) ‘transformed themselves into the most successful of newly industrializing countries via a fundamental rearrangement of urban and national space that had begun in the colonial period’ (pp. 4–5). Drawing on the work of Henri Lefebvre in particular, Watson seeks to explore how what she sees as the ‘uniquely influential’ (p. 1) forms of urban development experienced in these three cities and the accompanying rapid changes in the physical environment have produced ‘a particular kind of fictional text’ (p. 2). Or, to put it another way, she is tracing ‘how three-dimensional changes in the social and urban system become registered in two-dimensional textual forms’ (p. 14). Her original contribution is to apply an established theoretical approach – one whose intellectual home is arguably Watson's own NYU – in an admirably confident way to sites where it is inherently applicable but has not been exploited up to now.

Watson rightly points out that scholars of post-colonial literature (though not, I would argue, colonial and post-colonial historians) have neglected parts of the world which were subject to non-European colonialism, such as Taiwan and Korea, which were under Japanese control until the end of World War II. This book therefore offers a timely intervention in the field of literary studies with the potential to open it up to new avenues of enquiry. But Watson intends to speak to a much wider audience than her colleagues in the literary field: her approach is genuinely interdisciplinary, drawing on architecture, urban studies and film (particularly Taiwanese New Cinema), though she concentrates on fictional prose. Watson claims to be writing ‘a cultural and spatial history of the developmental state’ (p. 1), but with the absence of a more solid grounding in relevant developments in historical studies or engagement with historical sources, this is perhaps somewhat ambitious. Nevertheless, Watson's comparative approach is a strength: finding commonalities in the fiction of all three cities makes her arguments more compelling than if they depended on one site only. For example, Korean Yǒm Sang-sǒp's 1924 novel Mansejǒn (Before the March 1st Movement) is put in fruitful dialogue with Yaxiya de gu'er (Orphan of Asia) (1945) by Taiwanese Wu Zhuoliu, to demonstrate similarities in anti-colonial fiction in the two Japanese colonies. Both use journeys made by the protagonists to explore the rapid modernization brought by the imperial power and reflect ‘the deep psychological confusion resulting from the hypocrisies of colonialism’ (p. 64). Watson displays an impressive breadth of knowledge about Korean, Singaporean and Taiwanese literature in a field in which scholars often confine their attention to the study of literature produced in a single language.Footnote ¹

Notwithstanding this range, a weakness of the book is a tendency in places to rely on a small number of texts to illustrate broad arguments about the nature of the ‘new Asian cities’. For example, Watson depends heavily on a close reading of Yi Sang's novella Nalgae (The Wings) (1937) to support her central argument about the ‘connections between the distinct spaces of the colonial city and the experimental narrative space of the text’ (p. 73). As a historian, I found this a little unsatisfying, leading me to question how representative such (admittedly important) works can be, but on the whole Watson balances the need for both rigorous close analysis and range. Readers may also question the selection of the three cities themselves: Hong Kong is an obvious post-colonial urban society in the region and the extended period of its colonial status is not necessarily sufficient justification for its exclusion. Yet comparative studies are necessarily selective and Watson's is in many ways exemplary.

The volume is neatly structured, with three parts following a chronological progression which examine the three cities in terms of the ways in which their colonial history, post-war urbanism and industrializing landscapes are reflected in fiction, each concluded in anticipation of the next part of the book in a section entitled ‘Transitions’. Watson's style is fluent and engaging, presenting complex theories which in the hands of many other writers are unnecessarily cloaked in impenetrable prose, in an accessible and informative way. Owing in part to the nature of such a heavily theoretical approach, the literature review dominates not only the introduction but also the beginning of each part of the book, but as it is written so well this will be a boon to undergraduate and graduate students of post-colonial theory. The book will also be useful to a wide audience of scholars in urban studies, post-colonial literature, East and Southeast Asian history and film and to all readers interested in understanding an alternative path to ‘modernity’ to that followed in the west.