As Wang Anyi explains in the opening of her literary essays collection In Search of Shanghai 寻找上海, the Shanghai in its title is not an object of factual, historical study; it is an object of experience, an ‘image of the city’ (Lynch 1960) in the mind of its narrator, or, as Willa Cather (1976: 24; original 1935) writes in her novel Lucy Gayheart, a ‘city of feeling’: ‘Lucy carried in her mind a very individual map of Chicago: a blur of smoke and wind and noise, with flashes of blue water, and certain clear outlines rising from the confusion; a high building on Michigan Avenue where Sebastian had his studio – the stretch of park where he sometimes walked in the afternoon – the Cathedral door out of which she had seen him come one morning – the concert hall where she first heard him sing. This city of feeling rose out of the city of fact like a definite composition, – beautiful because the rest was blotted out.’ It is precisely this ‘city of feeling [rising] out of the city of fact’ that is the subject matter of this book. How is the city-of-feeling Shanghai imagined in contemporary Chinese fiction?

The corpus of this study is a selection of literary works published between 1998 and 2006, when urban transformation experienced its peak in Shanghai. It will examine how these works express the impact of Shanghai's urban transformation on its citizens.