Description
Book SynopsisThis collection is the first volume in English to examine the entire span of modern Taiwanese literature, from the first decades of the twentieth century to the present.
Trade Review“This is an original project, difficult to achieve, that updates scholarship on the literature of Taiwan. Its originality is strong and welcome.”—Edward Gunn, author of
Rewriting Chinese: Style and Innovation in Twentieth-Century Chinese Prose“[An] excellent book. . . . this is a conference volume, but either because conference planners were careful in extending invitations and assigning topics or because editors Wang and Rojas did masterful work in sorting and sifting submissions,
Writing Taiwan succeeds in mustering disparate voices to address the central topic of the way in which Taiwan has been narrated into existence.” -- Thomas Morgan * Chinese Literature *
“The volume, in fact, works wonderfully as a useful guide for literary scholars, pointing to accessible pathways to a very rich field for research and provocatively reconfiguring the current shape of Chinese literary studies. Anyone who is interested in transnational literary studies, particularly in relation to Asian literature and literatures in Chinese, will find something in this volume to help construct new theoretical and referential frameworks for his or her research.” -- Kuei-Fen Chiu * Journal of Asian Studies *
Table of ContentsPreface / David Der-wei Wang vii
Introduction / Carlos Rojas 1
Part One: The Limits of Taiwan Literature
1. Representing Taiwan: Shifting Geopolitical Frameworks / Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang 17
2. Postmodern or Postcolonial? An Inquiry into Postwar Taiwanese Literary History / Fangming Chen 26
3. On the Concept of Taiwan Literature / Xiaobing Tang 51
Part Two: Cultural Politics
4. The Importance of Being Perverse: China and Taiwan, 1931–1937 / Joyce C. H. Liu 93
5. “On Our Destitute Dinner Table”:
Modern Poetry Quarterly in the 1950s / Michelle Yeh 113
6. The Literary Development of Zhong Lihe and Postcolonial Discourse in Taiwan / Fenghuang Ying 140
7. Wang Wenxing’s
Backed against the Sea, Parts I and II: The Meaning of Modernism in Taiwan’s Contemporary Literature / Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang 156
Part Three: History, Truth, and Textual Artifice
8. The Monster That Is History: Jiang Gui’s
A Tale of Modern Monsters / David Der-wei Wang 181
9. Taiwanese Identity and the Crisis of Memory: Post-Chiang Mystery / Yomi Braester 213
10. Doubled Configuration: Reading Su Weizhen’s Theatricality / Gang Gary Xu 233
11. Techniques behind Lies and the Artistry of Truth: Writing about the Writings of Zhang Dachun / Kim-chu Ng 253
Part Four: Spectral Topographies 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 / Ping-hui Liao 285
13. Mapping Identity in a Postcolonial City: Intertextuality and Cultural Hybridity in Zhu Tianxin’s
Ancient Capital / Lingchei Letty Chen 301
14. Li Yongping and Spectral Cartography / Carlos Rojas 324
15. History, Exchange, and the Object Voice: Reading Li Ang’s
The Strange Garden and
All Sticks Are Welcome in the Censer of Beigang / Chaoyang Liao 348
16. Reenchanting the Image in Global Culture: Reification and Nostalgia in Zhu Tianwen’s Fiction / Ban Wang 370
Appendix: Chinese Characters for Authors’ Names and Titles of Works 389
Contributors 395
Index 397
