Publisher's Synopsis
'Arts Policy on Trial' tells the story of men of letters who lived on the Darroch Rd in Shanghai during the 1930s. Zhu traces their student years in Japan, Europe and the USA; how, through encounters with men like Paul Valéry in Paris and Friedrich Gundolf in Heidelberg, novel - rather than poetry - came to be their genre of choice; their subsequent struggle to reconcile China's literary language with the modern prose style that came with the novel; and their quarrels about the policy implications of western-style theatres and cinemas.
