Taiwanese Literature and Ecofeminism

Abstract

Taiwanese literature emerged as a distinct body of literature in the 1980s following three decades of energetic debate between writers and scholars seeking to found literature of local identity known as Xiang-tu (country and earth) and those promoting Chinese literature under the term of Third-World literature, a term for the literature of China inclusive of Taiwan. Opinion was divided between, on the one hand, scholars who regarded Taiwanese literature, also known as Chinese frontier literature, as being something that was primitive and unsophisticated in comparison with the literature from the mainland, and, on the other hand, scholars who saw in Taiwanese literature features that were different from but hardly inferior to what distinguished Chinese literature on the other side of the Taiwan Strait. In this chapter, Peter I-min Huang focuses on three critically acclaimed works of Taiwanese literature, Ang Li’s The Butcher’s Wife (1983), Jade Chen’s Mazu’s Body-Guards (2004), and Yao-ming Gan’s Pangcah Woman (2015), in the context of this history as well as in the critical light of the implicit and explicit ecofeminist arguments that the novels carry and generate.