Biographies of Shanghai Flowers: Embodied Space and the Building of an Affective Realism

Han Bangqing’s (1856–1894) novel Biographies of Shanghai Flowers (Haishang hua liezhuan 海上花列傳, 1894) offers a vivid portrayal of the vicissitudes of courtesans and their clients against the backdrop of a modernizing Shanghai. Because of its attention to urban details, scholarly discussions of the novel have emphasized its realistic impulse. Yet the profusion of details calls attention to itself, begging for new interpretive perspectives. Focusing on the novel’s representation and perception of space, this article rethinks the relationship between space and realism. Drawing upon anthropological and phenomenological approaches to space as “embodied,” everyday life theory, and affect theory, it shows that space in the novel is a fluid, sensuous dimension that affects and is affected by human experience. Such a conceptualization of space is key to restoring the materiality of space and to appreciating the novel’s building of an “affective realism.” The analysis of the play between opposites – presence and absence, truth and fiction, dream and reality – and of the structure of desire embedded in the novel’s complex linguistic and cultural make-up sheds light on the workings and implications of affective realism. The affective approach resists objectification of the real by addressing a common sensorium as embodied and sensual experiences embedded in a specific historical present.