Scholars of many disciplines have mined Shanghai's vast trove of Republican-era pictorial magazines to explore that city's vibrant cosmopolitan popular culture. Bevan's “Intoxicating Shanghai”– An Urban Montage argues for attention to pictorial magazines as a medium in themselves and, specifically, “as a major vehicle for the dissemination of the products of ‘avant-garde’ and ‘high’ cultural circles in Shanghai during the 1930s” (p. 3). The book on the one hand delimits its scope by focusing on just two ephemeral, yet in many ways representative, magazines: Wenyi huabao (Literature and Art Pictorial), and Wanxiang (Van Jan), both launched during Shanghai's “Year of the Magazine,” 1934. At the same time, through meticulous research, Bevan ties the contributors and contents of these two magazines into a rich and mutually resonant network of literary, artistic, cinematic and musical culture that helped define the 1930s as Shanghai's cosmopolitan “jazz age.”

As the book's title suggests, the method guiding this ambitious reconstructive effort is the metaphor of montage. The introductory essay, entitled “So this is Shanghai!,” thus begins with a photomontage from the prominent illustrated magazine Liangyou (Good Companion) displaying Shanghai's urban “intoxicants”: dance-hall jazz, women's fashion, high-rise buildings, sports betting, alcohol, coffee and Hollywood film. Across the next eight chapters, Bevan returns to these and other forms of modern urban culture as represented in popular literature and art of the mid-1930s, with particular attention to the contributors to and content of Wenyi huabao and Wanxiang. Featured within the book's densely informative analyses are translations of four modernist short stories by Hei Ying, Liu Na'ou and Mu Shiying, writers whose experimental and fragmentary “New-sensationist” style give narrative form to Shanghai's modern urban experience. These translations, three of which had not at the time of the book's publication been translated into English, in themselves contribute significantly to modern Chinese literary studies, although one might add that their misogynistic nature is even more disturbing today than when this body of intriguing work was being rediscovered some decades ago.

Part one, which includes the introductory essay, presents the two overarching subjects of the book: literature and art as elements of the pictorial magazine. Chapter one, “Literature and the pictorial magazine,” begins with biographical sketches of the three authors mentioned above, and of Ye Lingfeng, the writer and artist who coedited Wenyi huabao with Mu Shiying. Here Bevan contextualizes both Wenyi huabao and Wanxiang within Shanghai's booming magazine industry of the mid-1930s, noting in particular how these two self-consciously modern magazines emulated the blending of high and popular literary culture content found in American counterpart periodicals like Vanity Fair. Chapter two, “Art and the pictorial magazine,” then offers a scrupulously researched study of the eclectic global influences on the varieties of European and American visual art appearing in the two magazines. Part one ends with a translation of Hei Ying's short story “Hai Alai Scenes” which, like the other three translations, includes the original accompanying illustrations. The pair of chapters comprising part two of “Intoxicating Shanghai” address the tensions between China's left-wing and modernist camps of visual artists by foregrounding the influence of China's most authoritative writer and critic of the day, Lu Xun. Chapter three details the publication history of work by left-leaning European woodcut artists promoted by Lu Xun, as well as the work of George Grosz, whose artistic style was widely emulated by Chinese artists, but about whom Lu Xun, for reasons unclear, had little to say. Lu Xun's critiques of Wenyi huabao guide the discussion in chapter four. Bevan attributes these bitter verbal attacks to the famous author's longstanding enmity against Ye Lingfeng, and to Lu Xun's desire to defend his turf as the main spokesperson for leftist art in China.

Part three, “The Rise and Rise of the Pictorial Magazine,” shifts focus away from the largely monochrome left-wing woodcut print and toward the colourful cartoons, or manhua, that flourished in the milieu of the mid-1930s' magazine boom. Chapter five, after offering a background analysis of why 1934 came to be called “The Year of the Magazine,” turns its attention to bold cartoon-style magazine illustrations that thumbed their nose at Chiang Kai-shek's puritanical New Life Movement. Balancing the discussion of the “New-sensationist” writers in chapter one, chapter six then looks at the work and careers of three visual artists – Guo Jianying, Huang Miaozi and Ye Qianyu – whose illustrations accompany the book's four short story translations. The two chapters comprising part four, “The Shanghai Jazz Age,” examines the role of the pictorial magazine in generating the multilayered connections behind the city's fascination with cinema, celebrity, illustration, literature and live music.

Readers of “Intoxicating Shanghai” will be impressed with, and at times overwhelmed by, the amount of fine-grained detail Bevan has extracted from an array of primary sources, ranging from the American humour magazine Ballyhoo, to the book lists in Lu Xun's private diaries, to Busby Berkeley's cinematic extravaganzas. For researchers of Shanghai's jazz-age culture, the extensive footnotes and bibliography cataloguing the book's source materials provide a wealth of leads for further research. What one does not find in this book, however, is explicit engagement with existing scholarship on Shanghai's globalized urban culture. In the end, however, one can well argue that the resolutely empirical approach informing all of “Intoxicating Shanghai” is precisely what sets it apart from the other studies of Republican-era Shanghai.