Women, War, Domesticity: Shanghai Literature and Popular Culture of the 1940s

In December 1941, the fifth year in an all-scale cataclysmic Sino-Japanese war that devoured much of Eastern China, the city of Shanghai entered into an era of full occupation. This was the moment when a group of young women authors began writing and soon took over the cultural scene of the besieged metropolis. Women, War, Domesticity reconstructs cultures of reading, writing, and publishing in the city of Shanghai during the three years and eight months of Japanese occupation. It specifically depicts the formation of a new cultural arena initiated by a group of women who not only wrote, edited, and published, but also took part in defining and transforming the structure of modern knowledge, discussing it in various public forums surrounding the print media, and, consequently, promoting themselves as authoritative cultural commentators of the era.