Writing Taiwan: A New Literary History

Description

Writing Taiwan is the first volume in English to examine the entire span of modern Taiwan literature, from the first decades of the twentieth century to the present. In this collection, leading literary scholars based in Taiwan and the United States consider prominent Taiwanese authors and works in genres including poetry, travel writing, and realist, modernist, and postmodern fiction. The diversity of Taiwan literature is signaled by the range of authors treated, including Yang Chichang, who studied Japanese literature in Tokyo in the early 1930s and wrote all of his own poetry and fiction in Japanese; Li Yongping, an ethnic Chinese born in Malaysia and educated in Taiwan and the United States; and Liu Daren, who was born in mainland China and effectively exiled from Taiwan in the 1970s on account of his political activism.Because the island of Taiwan spent the first half of the century as a colony of Japan and the second half in an umbilical relationship to China, its literature challenges basic assumptions about what constitutes a “national literature.” Several contributors directly address the methodological and epistemological issues involved in writing about “Taiwan literature.” Other contributors investigate the cultural and political grounds from which specific genres and literary movements emerged. Still others explore themes of history and memory in Taiwan literature and tropes of space and geography, looking at representations of boundaries as well as the boundary-crossing global flows of commodities and capital. Like Taiwan’s history, modern Taiwan literature is rife with conflicting legacies and impulses. Writing Taiwan reveals a sense of its richness and diversity to English-language readers. Contributors. Yomi Braester, Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang, Fangming Chen, Lingchei Letty Chen, Chaoyang Liao, Ping-hui Liao, Joyce C. H. Liu, Kim-chu Ng, Carlos Rojas, Xiaobing Tang, Ban Wang, David Der-wei Wang, Gang Gary Xu, Michelle Yeh, Fenghuang Ying Contents Preface Introduction Part One: The Limits of Taiwan Literature 1 Representing Taiwan: Shifting Geopolitical Frameworks 2 Postmodern or Postcolonial? An Inquiry into Postwar Taiwanese Literary History 3 On the Concept of Taiwan Literature Part Two: Cultural Politics 4 The Importance of Being Perverse: China and Taiwan, 1931–1937 5 “On Our Destitute Dinner Table”: Modern Poetry Quarterly in the 1950s 6 The Literary Development of Zhong Lihe and Postcolonial Discourse in Taiwan 7 Wang Wenxing’s Backed against the Sea, Parts I and II: The Meaning of Modernism in Taiwan’s Contemporary Literature Part Three: History, Truth, and Textual Artifice 8 The Monster That Is History: Jiang Gui’s A Tale of Modern Monsters 9 Taiwanese Identity and the Crisis of Memory: Post-Chiang Mystery 10 Doubled Configuration: Reading Su Weizhen’s Theatricality 11 Techniques behind Lies and the Artistry of Truth: Writing about the Writings of Zhang Dachun Part Four: Sp ectral Topograp hies and Circuits of Desire 12 Travel in Early-Twentieth-Century Asia: On Wu Zhuoliu’s “Nanking Journals” and His Notion of Taiwan’s Alternative Modernity 13 Mapping Identity in a Postcolonial City: Intertextuality and Cultural Hybridity in Zhu Tianxin’s Ancient Capital 14 Li Yongping and Spectral Cartography 15 History, Exchange, and the Object Voice: Reading Li Ang’s The Strange Garden and All Sticks Are Welcome in the Censer of Beigang 16 Reenchanting the Image in Global Culture: Reification and Nostalgia in Zhu Tianwen’s Fiction Appendix: Chinese Characters for Authors’ Names and Titles of Works Contributors Index