Colonial Taiwan: Negotiating Identities and Modernity Through Literature (East Asian Comparative Literature and Culture, 8)

This book provides a refreshing and comprehensive analysis on colonial Taiwanese literature. It accentuates its thematic and stylistic richness, challenges the reductive "collaboration-resistance" binary, and calls for a multifaceted literary commonwealth. This book offers a thorough and thought-provoking study on the impact of Japanese colonialism on Taiwan's literary production from the 1920s to 1945. It redresses the previous nationalist and Japan-centric interpretations of works from Taiwan's Japanese period, and eschews a colonizer/colonized dichotomy. Through a highly sensitive textual analysis and contextual reading, this chronologically structured book paints a multi-layered picture of colonial Taiwan's literature, particularly its multi-styled articulations of identities and diverse visions of modernity. By engaging critically with current scholarship, Lin has written with great sentiment the most complete history of the colonial Taiwanese literary development in English. Contents Series Editors’ Foreword Acknowledgements Notes on Romanization and Translation Introduction: Relocating the Multilingual New Taiwanese Literature CHAPTER 1 The Nationalist Paradigm of Taiwan Literature: Lai He CHAPTER 2 From Nationalism to Socialism: Yang Kui CHAPTER 3 Popular Romances and Their Alternative Modernity: Xu Kunquan and Wu Mansha CHAPTER 4 Stylistic Reorientation and Innovation: Lü Heruo, Long Yingzong, and Weng Nao CHAPTER 5 How to Become “Japanese”?: Chen Huoquan, Wang Changxiong, and Zhou Jinbo CHAPTER 6 The Lure of China: Zhong Lihe and Wu Zhuoliu Epilogue: Toward a Multifaceted Literary Commonwealth Bibliography Glossary Index