This book views the Neo-Sensation mode of writing as a traveling genre, or style, that originated in France, moved on to Japan, and then to China. The author contends that modernity is possible only on "the transcultural site"-transcultural in the sense of breaking the divide between past and present, elite and popular, national and regional, male and female, literary and non-literary, inside and outside. To illustrate the concept of transcultural modernity, three icons are highlighted on the transcultural site: the dandy, the flaneur, and the translator. Mere flaneurs and flaneurses simply float with the tide of heterogeneous information on the transcultural site, whereas the dandy/flaneur and the cultural translator, propellers of modernity, manage to bring about transformative creation. Their performance marks the essence of transcultural modernity: the self-consciousness of working on the threshold, always testing the limits of boundaries and tempted to go beyond them. To develop the concept of dandyism-the quintessence of transcultural modernity-the Neo-Sensation gender triad formed by the dandy, the modern girl, and the modern boy is laid out. Writers discussed include Liu Na'ou, a Shanghai dandy par excellence from Taiwan, Paul Morand, who looked upon Coco Chanel the female dandy as his perfect other self, and Yokomitsu Riichi, who developed the theory of Neo-Sensation from Kant's the-thing-in-itself.

Peng Hsiao-yen is a research fellow at Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, Academia Sinica. She has published Antithesis Overcome: Shen Congwen's Avant-gardism and Primitivism and, in Chinese, Beyond realism and Desire in Shanghai: From Zhang Ziping to Liu Na'ou.

Introduction: Dandyism, the Quintessence of Transcultural Modernity 1. A Dandy, Traveler, and Woman Watcher: Liu Na'ou from Taiwan 2. A Traveling Subgenre: The Palm-of-the-Hand Story 3. The Flâneur and the Flâneuse: Yokomitsu Riichi's Shanghai 4. A Traveling Text: Souvenirs entomologiques 5. A Traveling Disease: The "Malady of the Heart" and the Modern Boy Conclusion: To Connect