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  • This article investigates how the urban fiction of Henrique de Senna Fernandes and Leung Ping-kwan mobilizes the cityscape to reflect on social change and the construction of regional identities in Macau and Hong Kong, particularly against the backdrop of the political and cultural transformations of the late twentieth century. The central argument posits that, although urban nostalgia is a recurring trait in Chinese literatures and even comparable to those of other metropolises, the case of Macau and Hong Kong renders this nostalgia inseparable from specific historical conjunctures: the peripheral status of the cities and their dual position as cosmopolitan centers of cultural encounter. Methodologically, Brookshaw proceeds with a comparative reading of the two authors’ works, articulating literary analysis (including differences in realism, narrative structure, and stylistic effects) with cultural geography and social history, in order to relate representational strategies to uses of territory. The article concludes that Fernandes, associated with a more conventional realism crossed with romanticism, tends to reconstitute an “anterior past” in which hierarchies and ties between zones—the “Chinese city” and the “Christian city”—appear less threatened by contemporary ruptures. In contrast, Leung’s writing, with its looser narrative structures and influences from the nouveau roman, dramatizes the city as a space in continuous mutation, highlighting new forms of sociability and disintegration. Thus, the texts function as imaginative archives that inscribe urbanity into the region’s history.

Last update from database: 9/14/26, 2:19 AM (UTC)

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