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This chapter provides an introduction to Xu Xu and Wumingshi and covers the book’s structure and methodology. It critiques the various terms that are used in both English and Chinese studies to categorise popular Chinese literature in the Republican period and it discusses the basis of the established divide between elite “new literature” (xin wenxue) and the much-castigated popular literature in China. It is argued that the term “Shanghai School” (haipai), a concept covering Shanghai popular literature from the 1920s to the 1940s, is too broad to be useful in analysing literature from this period or distinguishing between literary trends. The chapter also contains an extensive literature review, covering both English and Chinese works as they pertain to this study.

The popular literature of the 1940s often crossed boundaries between the popular and the elite as well as between modernism and romanticism. New positions became possible in the literary field, and writers like Xu Xu and Wumingshi exemplify these trends. They appropriated styles and tropes from earlier modernist writings in Chinese literature, thereby creating hybrid works that were among the most popular of the age. This chapter compares the writers covered in this study in terms of their depiction of modernity, narrative style, representation of the supernatural, and position in the literary field. Overall, the differences are found to outweigh the similarities, but the comparison highlights how various themes were adopted and adapted into popular literature of the 1940s from the New Sensationist writers of the preceding decade, showing their lasting impact.

Chapter 2 synthesizes scholarly work on diabetes narratives, a discussion of popular literature on diabetes, and interview data. It argues that the dominant American narratives on the origins of the diabetes epidemic emphasize the universality of risk and rely on the perception that illness arises when one treats the body in ways that are unnatural. The price of modernity, according to this origin story, is stress and the constant temptations of a sedentary lifestyle and unwholesome foods—indulgences that, because they are unnatural, cause harm to the body. Because everyone is imagined to be exposed to risks of modernity, mitigating risk is a matter of personal discipline; those that fall victim to so-called lifestyle diseases are implicitly or explicitly cast as morally culpable for their disease.

In “Chapter Four,” Lee analyzes popular songs, anecdotes, aphorisms, and jokes that were invested in perpetuating the image of Conversos as essentially greedy, non-pork-eating Jews. She examines the construction of the Converso body as a grotesque, sub-human entity in the anonymous Diálogo entre Laín Calvo y Nuño Rasura and in Quevedo’s satirical poetry. She discusses Lope de Vega’s little known play, El galán escarmentado, which specifically addresses the Old Christian anxiety of being unknowingly stained by the passing Conversos through marriage. She concludes her discussion of the fear of passing Conversos with an analysis of Cervantes’ El retablo de las maravillas, a play representing the madness and disorder that ensues when limpieza-obsessed Old Christians find themselves incapable of tagging the impure subjects who, they believe, live amongst them.

Chapter 3 relies on data from in-depth interviews with clinicians and members of the general public, participant observation, and a review of Japanese popular intellectual literature to examine narratives about the origins of diabetes in Japan. It argues that the most pervasive Japanese narratives emphasize the particularity of diabetes risk to Japanese bodies. This narrative implies that illness arises from a disconnect between Japanese bodies and non-Japanese food culture. The road to health is a return to an imagined traditional Japanese lifestyle that has been lost to globalization and westernization. Rather than stressing individual responsibility and temptation, dominant Japanese narratives stress a shared struggle against outside forces.