Literary Culture in Taiwan: Martial Law to Market Law (review)

Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang's study of the contextual forces that shaped literary history in Taiwan from 1949 to the early 1990s is the most comprehensive and theoretically sophisticated treatment of contemporary Chinese literature from Taiwan available to date in English. As a work that focuses on underlying issues such as cultural institutions, various literary camps, the political climate as it evolved through the decades, and other forces that shaped the environment in which literature was produced, this book is a very good complement to her previous book, Modernism and the Nativist Resistance: Contemporary Chinese Fiction from Taiwan (Duke, 1993), which primarily performs close readings of many salient literary texts written during the same period. The basic thesis of Literary Culture in Taiwan is that, given the gradual shift from political repression to hegemony and soft authoritarianism and finally to the predominant influence of market forces on literary trends, a new paradigm is necessary in order to adequately grasp the true nature of literary events in Taiwan over the past half-century. In particular, what is required, according to Chang, is a contextual approach that foregrounds the impact of politics and the marketplace on literature because these two external factors played such a determinative role in its production. She turns for her analysis of this relationship to the theoretical works of two exponents of Western Marxism-Raymond Williams (the monumental British cultural theorist) and Peter Uwe Hohendahl (a U.S.-based scholar of the Frankfurt school)-and to the work of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Each of these scholars has emphasized the social factors that condition cultural phenomena. Chang generally views the literary terrain in Taiwan as breaking down into four groups of authors: mainstream, modernist, nativist, and localist. Her book is divided into eight chapters that sketch in detail both the critical framework and discuss the literary events in Taiwan largely in chronological fashion.

In reading the book, I have come to the broad conclusion that above all the book is accurate. That may seem like faint praise to the reader, but it is not. By virtue of her constant study of Taiwan literature over a period that has spanned nearly three decades, Chang has at her fingertips the knowledge of historical minutiae on many different levels that allows her to place into context immediately practically any event, any work of literature, or any trend. She does this with the self-assurance of a master. Books on literature are always open to subjective evaluation to some extent-some more than others. It is my experience that occasionally books get published with wildly inaccurate views-not just of the literature in question (which I am willing to concede is open to various interpretations)-but of the historical, cultural, and social context as well. In some cases, these works have simply been wrong in their empirical understanding of the historical milieu. It is a pleasure, and actually somewhat refreshing, therefore, to read Chang's book and see that it not only comports with my understanding of the historical context but that it has enlightened me in some ways too. One usually gains insight from the critical readings of other scholars. What I found particularly noteworthy about this book, however, was Chang's complete grasp of Taiwan's postwar history as well as some subtle nuances in it that had escaped my attention.

In Chapter 1, Chang sets the stage for her analysis by providing a brief theory of previous approaches to the study of Taiwan, all of which are now essentially outmoded. She notes, for example, that in the first thirty years following the Civil War between the Nationalists and the Communists, most Western scholars did not have direct access to resources in mainland China and thus had to rely on Taiwan as a sort of micro-example of what modern Chinese culture and society supposedly looked like. Thus, many anthropologists, for example...