Description
Book SynopsisThe Soldier-Writer, the Expatriate, and Cold War Modernism in Taiwan: Freedom in the Trenches argues that what appeared to be a genesis of new literature engendered by the modernist movement in postwar Taiwan was made possible only through the splendid isolation within the Cold War world order sustaining the bubble in which Free China lived on borrowed time. The book explores the trenches of freedom in whose confines the soldier-poets'' were surrealistically acquiesced to roam free under the aegis of pure literature and the buffer zone created by the US presence in Taiwanand the modernists'' expatriate writing from Americathat aided their moderated deviance from the official line. It critically examines the anti-establishment character and gesture in the movement phase in terms of its entanglements with the state apparatus and the US-aided literary establishment. Taiwan''s modernists counterbalance their retrospectively perceived excess and nuanced forms of exit with a series of spi
Trade Review
In this seminal study of Taiwan’s literary modernism in the Cold War context,
Li-Chun Hsiao probes into a number of unexamined assumptions about its rise and development and seeks to tease out a cultural politics and poetics of Cold War modernism in Taiwan mainly by addressing the “soldier-poets” and expatriate writers as a crossover point for a number of discursive practices whose origins are elsewhere: of Cold War ideology, US foreign policy, aesthetic doctrines and literary pedagogy, long-distance Chinese nationalism, among others. It is a superb work of scholarship, painstakingly researched, copiously documented, and gracefully written.
-- Chun-san Wang, Asia University
Table of ContentsIntroduction
Chapter One: “Speech after Long Silence”: The 1956 Manifesto and the Obscure(d) Beginnings of a Cold War Modernism
Chapter Two: A Double-edged Sword?: the Rise of the Soldier-Poets and Their Modernist Turn
Chapter Three: Breaking Ground in Splendid Isolation: Death of a Stone Cell and Cold War Ethos
Chapter Four: Two States of One Peculiar Modernism: From the US-Aided Literary Establishment to the Culture of US Aids
Chapter Five: At Home in Exile: The Cold War Modernist, the Expatriate, and the Literature of Exile
Bibliography
About the Author
