Lagging a few years behind China’s shift toward “new literature,” pai-hua (vernacular) and mass culture following the May 4th Movement, Taiwan by the mid-1920’s, with the decline of its aristocratic cultural elite, had undergone a similar transformation. This essay discusses various aspects of this transformation, which, as in China, was strongly influenced by the reading of reprinted Western fiction and poetry (and in Taiwan, also reprinted Chinese fiction and poetry), by analyzing the works of several key Taiwan writers of the 1920’s and 1930’s. Particular emphasis is given to the central theme of anticolonialism (Taiwan was a colony of Japan) and national (Taiwanese) identity, and to the crucial role of the T’ai-wan minpao, which published many of these writers.

Here I first suggest that, contrary to Galik’s view, Mao Tun is not just a “realist” but a naturalist. Then, a by looking at Mao Tun’s fictional as weil as critical and theoretical writing, I try to show that here we find more than just “naturalistic” techniques; we find a naturalistic outlook on life, a way of thinking, seeing, reflecting, and experimenting, a need to study and analyze in order to know.

This paper draws upon Norman Holland’s The Dynamics of Literary Response, in its psychoanalytic interpretation of three stories from Pu Songling’s (1640-1715) Liaozhai Zhiyi. “Fairy Qing-E,” “Fox-Girl Changting,” and “The Painted Wall.” It argues that each of these three stories employs various defense maneuvers (e.g., displacement, splitting, projection, regression, denial, reversal, etc.) to disguise an Oedipal fantasy which otherwise would cause the reader much anxiety. The author of this paper also tries to explore the boundaries among author, text, and reader (as co-author of the text).

The textualization of the Shui-hu chuan is viewed against the background of the social mobility and the reshuffle of cultural forces in connection with the civil service examination. As the first full-length vernacular narrative in Chinese literature, Shui-hu chuan represents an indignant protest by lettered men who had been disgraced by failure in the examination which was based upon a tradition that idolized the printed words of the past ages. Those frustrated men broke from the ku-wen tradition and flung themselves into the embrace of the popular orality; they worked with the popular storytellers and gradually wrote down their oral narrative. That they used the vernacular and not literary Chinese is tied to the fact that Shui-hu Chuan is a work for “venting indignation.” As a story of rebels emphasizing how the rebels became rebels, Shui-hu chuan’s contents parallel the experience of the men of letters who worked to write down the oral tradition. Thus the content of the Shui-hu chuan story and the form of its presentation become a radical manifesto of a new literary movement and a belligerent call for discontinuity to a perpetualized tradition that had become sapless.

Here I discuss two narrative works which, due to their depiction of fantastic adventures in foreign lands, have been called the “Gulliver's Travels” of their respective literary traditions: the 18th-centruy Japanese Furyn Shidoken Den and early 19th-century Chinese Jing hua Yuan. Both of these narratives utilize the portrayal of bizarre foreign lands visited by sea as a Satirical device, directed in Swiftian fashion toward domestic political and intellectual issues. Thus, as in Swift, there is little attempt at description of real conditions in actual countries—partly a function if the relative isolation of Japan and China at that time. Of particular interest is the critique of Confucianism (arbitrary social hierarchy) and the use of gender reversal in both works.

This is the text of an interview with Elaine Kim, the author of the ground-breaking Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Socia Context and a founding member of the Asian American Studies Program at U.C. Berkeley. The interview explores the changing meaning of “Asian American Studies”--whereas once the main social-literary issue was the problem of abandoning one’s Asianness in order to be assimilated and identified as an “American,” the central issue now is the definition and expression of one’s (original) Asian identity within or against the background of American culture--in the context of contemporary cultural issues (race, gender, cultural piuralism) and literary-political theory (cultural studies, post-colonialism, feminism} and with reference to several contemporary Asian American works of fiction.