ABSTRACT
The development of literature in postwar Taiwan has been an extremely fertile phenomenon. The reasons include the exodus of a great many people from mainland China at the end of the Civil War (1945–1949) between the Nationalist (Kuomintang) and the Communist forces, the limited autonomy that writers were afforded in Taiwan in the postwar period as well as the stability of the island, especially after 1947, in contrast to the mainland, and the intellectual foundation that native Taiwanese intellectuals established during the Japanese colonial period. Literature from Taiwan is a complex subject that involves many genres, different stages, and people from a wide variety of backgrounds and experiences. In the 1950s, there were two general trends: a period in fiction writing when most writers were still fixated on mainland China, often with strong ideological content; and the emergence of a group of poets who began to forge a new path as early as 1954. The late 1950s and the early 1960s saw the rise of literary modernism as the dominant aesthetic, largely in reaction to the historical romanticism of the 1950s. The “Nativist” or xiangtu writers were contemporaries of the Modernists, but perhaps because they came into dominance slightly later, they are often viewed as part of a subsequent movement in reaction to the Modernists. From around 1960 to the late 1980s, Taiwan literature was filled with exquisitely wrought minor masterpieces, in both fiction and poetry. The period of the 1990s and into the present times has seen profound variety and highly sophisticated work, often termed postmodern. No single essay can cover all the outstanding literary works in postwar Taiwan. This essay centers on some of the most prominent authors who flourished from the 1950s through the 1970s.
