ABSTRACT
Taiwan has been a significant and relatively dynamic production site of Chinese-language literature since 1949, a year often considered the end of modernity as far as modern Chinese literature is concerned. Although writers in the newly founded People’s Republic of China did not produce many innovative creative works until the late 1970s, authors in Taiwan (also those in Hong Kong) were fairly experimental as early as the mid-1950s when some émigré writers began to introduce modernist aesthetics to Taiwan and published works that are subversive not only to the high-handed Nationalist rule but also to the growing complacency of Taiwan’s middle-class. Overall, literature from Taiwan has exhibited thematic and stylistic diversity throughout the second half of the 20th century. The multiplicity in themes and styles has increased particularly since the 1980s, in contrast to the 1950s, the 1960s, and the 1970s, dominated by its mainstream writing – anti-Communist literature, modernist literature, and nativist literature, respectively.
