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.

Nativism and Modernity is the first comparative study of xiangtu nativism in Taiwan and xungen nativism in China. It offers a new critical perspective on these two important literary and cultural movements in contemporary Chinese contexts and shows how nativism can be a vital form of place-based oppositional practice under global capitalism. While nativism has often been viewed in nostalgic terms, Ming-yan Lai instead focuses on the structural implications of nativist oppositional claims and their transformations of marginality into alternative discursive spaces and practices. Through contextual analysis and close readings of key texts, Lai addresses interdisciplinary issues of modernity and critically explores the two nativist discourses' various engagements with power relations covering a multitude of social differentiations, including nation, class, gender, and ethnicity.

This book is a cross-cultural, interdisciplinary study which compares responses to modernity in the literary cultures of Japan and Taiwan, 1960-1990. Moving beyond the East-West framework that has traditionally dominated comparative enquiry, the volume sets out to explore contemporary East Asian literature on its own terms. As such, it belongs to the newly emerging area of inter-Asian cultural studies, but is the first full-length monograph to explore this field through the prism of literature. The book combines close readings of paradigmatic texts with in-depth analysis of the historical, social, and ideological contexts in which these works are situated, and explores the form and function of literary practice within the “miracle” societies of industrialized East Asia.

In the aftermath of 1949, Taiwan’s elites saw themselves as embodying China in exile both politically and culturally. The island—officially known as the Republic of China—was a temporary home to await the reconquest of the mainland. Taiwan, not the People’s Republic, represented China internationally until the early 1970s. Yet in recent decades Taiwan has increasingly come to see itself as a modern nation-state. A-chin Hsiau traces the origins of Taiwanese national identity to the 1970s, when a surge of domestic dissent and youth activism transformed society, politics, and culture in ways that continue to be felt. After major diplomatic setbacks at the beginning of the 1970s posed a serious challenge to Kuomintang authoritarian rule, a younger generation without firsthand experience of life on the mainland began openly challenging the status quo. Hsiau examines how student activists, writers, and dissident researchers of Taiwanese anticolonial movements, despite accepting Chinese nationalist narratives, began to foreground Taiwan’s political and social past and present. Their activism, creative work, and historical explorations played pivotal roles in bringing to light and reshaping indigenous and national identities. In so doing, Hsiau contends, they laid the basis for Taiwanese nationalism and the eventual democratization of Taiwan. Offering bracing new perspectives on nationalism, democratization, and identity in Taiwan, this book has significant implications spanning sociology, history, political science, and East Asian studies.

Interventions into Modernist Cultures is a comparative analysis of the cultural politics of modernist writing in the United States and Taiwan. Amie Elizabeth Parry argues that the two sites of modernism are linked by their representation or suppression of histories of U.S. imperialist expansion, Cold War neocolonial military presence, and economic influence in Asia. Focusing on poetry, a genre often overlooked in postcolonial theory, she contends that the radically fragmented form of modernist poetic texts is particularly well suited to representing U.S. imperialism and neocolonial modernities. Reading various works by U.S. expatriates Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, Parry compares the cultural politics of U.S. canonical modernism with alternative representations of temporality, hybridity, erasure, and sexuality in the work of the Taiwanese writers Yü Kwang-chung and Hsia Yü and the Asian American immigrant author Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Juxtaposing poems by Pound and Yü Kwang-chung, Parry shows how Yü’s fragmented, ambivalent modernist form reveals the effects of neocolonialism while Pound denies and obscures U.S. imperialism in Asia, asserting a form of nondevelopmental universalism through both form and theme. Stein appropriates discourses of American modernity and identity to represent nonnormative desire and sexuality, and Parry contrasts this tendency with representations of sexuality in the contemporary experimental poetry of Hsia Yü. Finally, Parry highlights the different uses of modernist forms by Pound in his Cantos—which incorporate a multiplicity of decontextualized and ahistorical voices—and by Cha in her 1982 novel Dictee, a historicized, multilingual work. Parry’s sophisticated readings provide a useful critical framework for apprehending how “minor modernisms” illuminate the histories erased by certain canonical modernist texts.

The 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 Taiwan—and the modernists' expatriate writing from America—that 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 spiritual as well as actual returns, upon which earlier traditionalist undercurrents would surface. This modernism's mixed legacies, with its aesthetic avant-gardism marrying politically moderate or conservative penchants, date back to its bifurcated mode of existence and operation of separating the realm of the aesthetic from everything else in life during the Cold War.

"The year 1949 witnessed China divided into multiple political and cultural entities. How did this momentous shift affect Chinese literary topography? Modernity with a Cold War Face examines the competing, converging, and conflicting modes of envisioning a modern nation in mid-twentieth century Chinese literature. Bridging the 1949 divide in both literary historical periodization and political demarcation, Xiaojue Wang proposes a new framework to consider Chinese literature beyond national boundaries, as something arising out of the larger global geopolitical and cultural conflict of the Cold War.Examining a body of heretofore understudied literary and cultural production in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and overseas during a crucial period after World War II, Wang traces how Chinese writers collected artistic fragments, blended feminist and socialist agendas, constructed ambivalent stances toward colonial modernity and an imaginary homeland, translated foreign literature to shape a new Chinese subjectivity, and revisited the classics for a new time. Reflecting historical reality in fictional terms, their work forged a path toward multiple modernities as they created alternative ways of connection, communication, and articulation to uncover and undermine Cold War dichotomous antagonism."

"Quite apart from her contributions as a literary critic, Shu-mei Shih is able to historicize literary developments of the period most persuasively. Her analysis of Shanghai, the city, and the literary movement it spawned, is crafted with great sensitivity to both history and literature. In many ways, it is the most inclusive historical study of modern Chinese literature in its formative period."—Prasenjit Duara, author of Rescuing History from the Nation "Tracing the spectral production of 'Chinese' identity as it is disseminated globally, Shih boldly moves away from using place (ethnicity) and the body (race) to anchor Chinese identity, to argue that the visual (film) and the verbal (language and linguistics) are the most salient ones in the modern and contemporary historical formation. She succeeds brilliantly."—David Palumbo-Liu, author of Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier "This is the most thoroughly researched study of Chinese modernism published to date. The author's theoretical interventions greatly enrich our understanding of colonial modernity and the stakes of comparison in cross-cultural studies. The book is a major contribution to modern Chinese literary studies and comparative literature."—Lydia Liu, editor of Tokens of Exchange

The figure of the Chinese sex worker—who provokes both disdain and desire—has become a trope for both Asian American sexuality and Asian modernity. Lingering in the cultural imagination, sex workers link sexual and cultural marginality, and their tales clarify the boundaries of citizenship, nationalism, and internationalism. In Transpacific Attachments, Lily Wong studies the mobility and mobilization of the sex worker figure through transpacific media networks, illuminating the intersectional politics of racial, sexual, and class structures. Transpacific Attachments examines shifting depictions of Chinese sex workers in popular media—from literature to film to new media—that have circulated within the United States, China, and Sinophone communities from the early twentieth century to the present. Wong explores Asian American writers’ articulation of transnational belonging; early Hollywood’s depiction of Chinese women as parasitic prostitutes and Chinese cinema’s reframing the figure as a call for reform; Cold War–era use of prostitute and courtesan metaphors to question nationalist narratives and heteronormativity; and images of immigrant brides against the backdrop of neoliberalism and the flows of transnational capital. She focuses on the transpacific networks that reconfigure Chineseness, complicating a diasporic framework of cultural authenticity. While imaginations of a global community have long been mobilized through romantic, erotic, and gendered representations, Wong stresses the significant role sex work plays in the constant restructuring of social relations. “Chineseness,” the figure of the sex worker shows, is an affective product as much as an ethnic or cultural signifier.