Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang

Sung-sheng Chang

Chang analyzes the political and economic forces that have shaped the publishing world in Taiwan from the middle of the last century to the present and the literary and cultural texts produced within this shifting landscape. Literary Culture in Taiwan positions various writers and genres squarely within the tensions between cultural production and the market-authorized economy of the past two decades, particularly in regard to cultural identity formations and their relationship to hegemonic and resistant powers. The lifting of martial law - and thus state-sponsored censorship - in 1987 introduced an electoral democracy that altered emerging literary trends and cast a dramatic new light on Taiwan's literary history. Chang traces this gradual but profound change and explores how multiple literary movements responded to one another and to the country's social and political upheaval.

Martial Law to Market Law

Literary Culture in Taiwan

Michelle Yeh

Ming-ju Fan

This sourcebook contains more than 160 documents and writings that reflect the development of Taiwanese literature from the early modern period to the twenty-first century. Selections include seminal essays in literary debates, polemics, and other landmark events; interviews, diaries, and letters by major authors; critical and retrospective essays by influential writers, editors, and scholars; transcripts of historical speeches and conferences; literary-society manifestos and inaugural journal prefaces; and governmental policy pronouncements that have significantly influenced Taiwanese literature. These texts illuminate AsiaÕs experience with modernization, colonialism, and postcolonialism; the character of TaiwanÕs Cold War and postÐCold War cultural production; gender and environmental issues; indigenous movements; and the changes and challenges of the digital revolution. TaiwanÕs complex history with Dutch, Spanish, and Japanese colonization; strategic geopolitical position vis--vis China, Japan, and the United States; and status as a hub for the East-bound circulation of technological and popular-culture trends make the nation an excellent case study for a richer understanding of East Asian and modern global relations.

The Columbia Sourcebook of Literary Taiwan

The first comprehensive English-language study of literary trends in the fiction of Taiwan over the last forty years, this pioneering work explores a rich tradition of literary Modernism in its shifting relationship with Chinese politics and culture. Situating her subject in its historical context, Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang traces the connection between Taiwan's Modernists and the liberal scholars of pre-Communist China. She discusses the Modernists' ambivalent relationship with contemporary Taiwan's conservative culture, and provides a detailed critical survey of the strife between the Modernists and the socialistically inclined, anti-Western Nativists. Chang's approach is comprehensive, combining Chinese and comparative perspectives. Employing the critical insights of Raymond Williams, Peter Burger, M. M. Bahktin, and Fredric Jameson, she investigates the complex issues involved in Chinese writers' appropriation of avant-gardism, aestheticism, and various other Western literary concepts and techniques. Within this framework, Chang offers original, challenging interpretations of major works by the best-known Chinese Modernists from Taiwan. As an intensive introduction to a literature of considerable quality and impact, and as a case study of the global spread of Western literary Modernism, this book will be of great interest to students of Chinese and comparative literature, and to those who wish to understand the broad patterns of twentieth-century literary history.

Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang

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