The article is divided into two parts. The first part offers a brief survey of the socio-cultural context, critical reactions, and intellectual presuppositions of Modernist literature in postwar Taiwan. One point being stressed here is that, since writers and critics of Modernist literature are both deeply embroiled in contemporary cultural politics, it would be difficult to properly assess its real contributions without looking back at the Modernist literary project as it was originally conceived. The second part consists of a critical analysis of Wang Wenxing’s recently completed sequel to a 1981 novel Beihai de ren [Backed against the seal]. In the analysis, Wang’s novel is taken to exemplify specific features of Taiwan’s Modernist literary project as a high culture quest.

The 1998 novel Zhu Ling manyou xianjing, by the Chinese-Malaysian author Li Yongping, can be read as an informal sequel to his mammoth, one thousand page 1992 novel Haidong qing. Like its predecessor, Zhu Ling allegorically explores the interrelation between individual (esp. female) maturational trajectories and collective, socio-political ones. The present essay contends that Li’s novel parallels a dialectical contrast between superficially cosmetic and violently transgressive conceptualizations of a girl’s loss of virginity and her symbolic entry into mature womanhood, on the one hand, and of Taiwan’s political separation from the Chinese mainland, on the other.

In Zhu Tianxin’s recent writings, nostalgia is deployed as an interpretative figure to examine the problematic of home—a problematic that is activated by the disruption of the postmodern temporality into the modern space and the resulting dissociation between the place which one inherits and the space of home which one must endlessly invent. Her novels set into motion the double logic of nostalgia both as homesickness and as home sickness. Presenting nostalgia as both symptom and diagnosis of the current identity crisis in Taiwan, Zhu’s recent writings nevertheless give the nostalgic impulse an ironic twist. Her nostalgic gaze problematizes the location of home not to dismiss the home as a valid spatial marker of identification but to proffer a different logic of nostalgia, making the failure of homecoming a productive one.

Nature always serves as a form of resistance to communist state discourse in contemporary Chinese arts and literature. This paper examines how Misty Poetry constructs a new form of subjectivity through its historical depiction of the natural world. The works of Yang Lian are closely read in terms of their different treatment of natural objects in comparison to the Western modernist poetics. With a strong root-searching inclination, Yang's poems attempt to find a way back to the untamed rudeness of nature that can revitalize the national culture. However, natural being is never a positive entity but can only be retroactively constructed by the searching subject itself.

The Malaysian dramatist Kee Thuan Chye’s plays disrupt the dominant narrative constructed by the Malaysian state of the nation as a Malay-centric, monocultural, monolingual society. Working with modernist dramaturgical devices, the plays work to denaturalize and demystify raced and classed ideologies that normalize social divisions and Malaysian real-politik and to argue for the reconstruction of a just Malaysian society.

Edwain Thumboo, national poet of Singapore, has witnessed the independence and modernization of his country, hence characterizing himself “post-colonial.” Believing that English could be the “bridge language” to connect different ethnic groups in Singapore, he has endowed poetry in English with the mission of cultural writing with an aim to combining the past, the present and the future of the country. His notion that “we tap tradition and modernity,” has been criticized, mainly by Western scholars, for keeping a vision too optimistic and therefore lacking self-criticism. This paper attempts to argue that Thumboo’s belief in the functioning of tradition and modernity in a postcolonial condition can be understood by a postmodern logic of nationalism. In the perverse doubling of nationalism, things can be both the same and different, old and new at once in an on-going process. This reveals not so much a disabling flaw as the secret of the persistent and productive dynamism of nationalism.

The textual products of the Mahua polysystem from the 1930s to the 1950s reflected a process of nationalization. But a systemic and functional change took place in the early sixties, when some Mahua men-in-the-culture belatedly launched a Modernist movement to set their works off from the local Chinese literature of Social-Realim. Through the efforts of the Genaration of 1968, the editors of the Chao Foon Monthly in Malay(sija and Liang Meng Kwang, the editor of the literary supplements of the Nanyang Siang Pau in Singapore, Modernist literature gained an important position in the Mahua polysystem. Mahua wenxue eventually turned from a monocentered institution into a double-centered literary polysystem. The present paper describes this process of modernization, or autonomization of nationalized literature, from a polysystemic aspect and places Tan Swie Hian, the leading poet of the Generation of 1968, as a major figure in initiating the Modernist project.

Charles Yim-tze Kwong: Tao Qian and the Chinese Poetic Tradition: The Quest for Cultural Identity (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1994)