Recent studies of Shanghai have scorned the predictable paradigm of the city as suspended between simplistic binaries of East and West, tradition and modernity. Or, more accurately, many newer studies of Shanghai, especially those focused on Shanghai's culture and leisure industries, have addressed the complex question of “what Shanghai is” with increasing precision and sophistication. Among Shanghai's cultural products, the Shanghai novel is clearly enjoying a rehabilitation of late, and Alexander Des Forges's Mediasphere Shanghai: The Aesthetics of Cultural Production takes as its subject the aesthetics and consumption of popular serialized Shanghai fiction published between the 1890s and 1930s. Moving past outmoded tendencies to dismiss the Shanghai novel for its commercialism and perceived frivolousness, Des Forges instead proceeds from the far more interesting question of how Shanghai's distinctive art forms were instrumental in constructing the city's equally distinctive identity. Mediasphere Shanghai investigates the ways in which the themes, form, and aesthetics of the serialized novel, a singularly Shanghai product, did not merely reflect but rather generated the meaning and even the experience of Shanghai for an audience of residents, visitors, and distant readers. Fully acknowledging without at all reducing Shanghai's complex heterogeneity, Des Forges demonstrates how the city's endlessly multiplying worlds and its very modernity were established, bridged, and negotiated in these novels—indeed, how the novels actively wrote the city and its audiences into existence.

The book's title engages Régis Debray's concept of a “mediasphere,” here defined as ever-expanding, interlocking matrices of cultural production, including everything from texts and images to film and radio. The first five chapters address the shared thematic and formal strategies of serialized novels—including Han Bangqing's Lives of Shanghai Flowers (1892–1894) and Bi Yihong and Bao Tianxiao's Hell in This World (1922–1924)—that stitch such works together into both a genre and crucial constituents of Shanghai's own flourishing mediasphere. Des Forges begins by exploring the novels’ discourse on the city's many dichotomies, whether in the insistent juxtaposing of standard Chinese and regional dialects or foreign concession and native city, as examples of the production and projection of Shanghai's singular heterogeneity. This is elaborated in chapter 5 in a discussion of the broker and other middleman figures who ultimately give shape to the concept of the Szahaenin or “Shanghai person,” agilely maneuvering in and between the city's numerous spheres.

This iconography of Shanghai is matched in the intervening chapters with an examination of installment fiction's specific formal strategies, which both generate and bind this vision of multiple worlds together. Des Forges reveals the novels' consistent referencing of a dominant grid of Shanghai streets and places, the reiteration of multiple crosscutting plot lines with no final resolution, and a fascination with constant circuitous motion and simultaneity. It is through such devices, Des Forges shows, that the novels produce a totalizing vision of Shanghai for their audience. The novels' readers are, in their turn, conceived as an imagined community consuming each installment in real time, always left hungry for more of these seductive renderings of Shanghai continuously churned out by its mediasphere. The last part of the book takes a longer view of the serialized novel, first from the vantage point of mid-century modernist fiction, and then “old Shanghai” nostalgia of the later twentieth century, demonstrating a potent, even surprising, continuity in the tradition of the Shanghai imaginary reaching down to the present day.

This is a fine and ambitious book. It is admirable not only as a study of the neglected genre of Shanghai installment fiction, but also as an excellent and original inquiry into how this exceedingly complex and fascinating city was and is defined through its cultural products and social practices. If anything, the book occasionally suffers from its own overabundance of rich ideas, in that certain themes and observations are not as fully developed as they deserve. I was personally disappointed not to find a more extensive discussion of the craft and mechanics of novel production: tantalizing comments by Han Bangqing on writing techniques and a glancing mention that readers could write in and impact the course of the novels hint at a very human dimension to the rendering of an almost juggernaut-like mediasphere that seems to spring into place overnight (this concept of a massive mediasphere might also have been usefully modulated by Appadurai's framework for a social imaginary, with his notions of ideoscapes and mediascapes). Another quibble might be that, although Des Forges raises the intriguing idea of a monolithic media complex, including in his somewhat misleading title, he touches only fleetingly on installment fiction's relationship with other cultural genres and media. However, these shortcomings are outweighed by the book's stimulating contributions to the ongoing recovery of Shanghai's cultural texts, its important investigation of the newness of such products and their audiences, and their larger import in constructing the feverish dream that is Shanghai.