Taiwanese Literature as World Literature

Abstract

Owing to Taiwan’s multi-ethnic nature and palimpsestic colonial past, Taiwanese literature is naturally multilingual. Although it can be analyzed in the frameworks of Japanophone literature and Chinese literature, and the more provocative Sinophone literature, it is only through viewing Taiwanese literature as world literature that we can redress the limits of national identity and fully examine writers’ transculturation practice, globally minded vision, and the politics of its circulation. Throughout the colonial era, Taiwanese writers gained inspiration from global literary trends mainly but not exclusively through the medium of Japanese and Chinese. Modernism was the mainstream literary style in 1960s Taiwan, and since the 1980s Taiwanese literature has demonstrated a unique trajectory shaped jointly by postmodernism and postcolonialism. These movements exhibit Taiwanese writers’ creative adaptations of world literary thought as a response to their local and trans-national reality. It is also during the postwar years that Taiwanese literature began to be