Much to this rich collection's credit, it is a daunting challenge to identify one excerpt from The Columbia Sourcebook of Literary Taiwan that can aptly capture the book's multiple contributions to East Asian literary studies and encompass the array of insights, spirited debates, and vast historical terrain covered by its many contributors. Yet a few eloquent lines from “Postscript to On the Island's Edge” (pp. 408–9), originally published in 1995 by the poet Chen Li and translated here by Brian Skerratt, provide an idyllic visualization of the volume's central concerns: “I live on an island's edge, but I think the island's edge can also be the center of the world…. I know there are some things that naturally constrain me, so I move through my world dauntlessly and confidently; in the small city I live in, I reproduce all cities, I travel the world” (p. 408). Based in Hualien on Taiwan's east coast, the poet defies any resource limitations and apparent impediments to his mobility by combing through and combining the different, even opposed, sources available to him—including “the nativist and the avant-garde, the island and the world” (p. 408)—that make this “island's edge” at once extraordinarily unique and generically reflective of broader transcultural processes. Chen's lyrical sentiments bridge a paradigmatic tension that reverberates throughout The Columbia Sourcebook: on the one hand, there are despondent laments of Taiwan as tiny, marginal, repeatedly violated by outside authorities, and culturally dependent (even deficient); on the other hand, there are confident affirmations of the island's historical centrality, multicultural vitality, linguistic innovativeness, democratic spirit, literary sophistication, and bounty of natural wonders.
The texts thoughtfully curated in this volume underscore how literary practice in Taiwan has been continually repositioned according to the island's subordinate and/or lateral relationships to other societies and literatures, from determinations of Taiwan literature's position (as a colonial, regional, or tributary tradition) within Chinese or Japanese literature to assessments of Taiwan literature as influenced by but existing autonomously of Chinese, Japanese, and Western literatures. The sourcebook thus serves as an archival repository of Taiwan's “convoluted literary history,” which co-editor Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang describes in the volume's introduction as “a product of the clashes and convergences of diverse cultural matrixes,” containing “elements that either mirror and magnify or confound and contradict common patterns found elsewhere in the region” (p. 2). Chang's introduction provides a critical overview of these regional patterns and nicely synthesizes the three historical periods that demarcate the volume's sectional divisions: (1) “The Beginnings and Entry into Modernity through Colonial Mediation (1728–1948),” (2) “Wading through the Cold War under Martial Law (1949–1987),” and (3) “The Era of Democracy and Globalization (1987–2005).”
The opening entries to part 1—excerpts from eighteenth-century volumes demonstrating how Qing dynasty administrators wrote an exoticized Taiwan into the frontier imagination of imperial China—mainly serve as a preamble to the bulk of writings in the section, drawn predominantly from the Japanese colonial period and postdating the 1911 foundation of the Republic of China. These entries grapple with two formidable developments: the encroachment of Japanese imperial policies demanding cultural assimilation and national loyalty, and the local resonances of China's New Culture movement emphasizing a modern vernacular literature. Dissent emerges in the Sinophone sphere between figures such as Zhang Wojun (a modern poet who advocated the Chinese vernacular), Huang Shihui (a leftist advocating nativist literature in Hoklo who denounced most Chinese New Literature as elitist), and Lai Minghong (a literary editor who accused nativist authors of muddling Chinese consciousness and destroying Chinese characters with their Taiwanese linguistic experimentations). In the Japanophone sphere, part 1 features an intriguing exchange on “kuso realism” (literally “feces” realism and referring to a kind of base or stark naturalism) between Nishikawa Mitsuru (a Japanese author involved in colonial Taiwan literary circles) and Yang Kui (an author of proletarian literature who wrote his first stories in Japanese).
Moving into the Cold War period of Nationalist dictatorship and American neocolonial patronage, part 2 begins with the establishment of an anticommunist “military literature” to serve the state agenda; continues with editorial manifestos outlining the aesthetic visions of modernist literary magazines; and concludes, in the waning years of martial law, with the defiant reemergence of a nativist Taiwan consciousness. More importantly, the voices in part 2 draw attention to dissenting views within various camps often homogenized by the grand narrative, evident in the modernist poet Yu Guangzhong's vociferous reproach of nihilism in favor of romanticism, or in Wang Tuo's call to replace the term “nativist literature” with “realist literature” because he felt the former term falsely insinuated a rural literature that ignored Taiwan's urban environments. Beyond this, part 2 includes historical reevaluations of the literary practices of the earlier era covered in part 1, and also provides translations of documents detailing intriguing literary controversies, such as the announcement by the Chinese Writers Association, in compliance with “current national policy,” that it was launching a “cultural cleansing movement” and revoking the membership of Guo Lianghui for the bestselling author's depictions of incest in her 1963 popular novel The Locked Heart (p. 206).
Covering the post–martial law era of democratic transformation and neoliberal globalization, part 3 observes a proliferation of previously marginalized topics of literary and historical inquiry. Issues of gender inequality and sexual orientation move to the fore: in a 1991 diary entry, Qiu Miaojin, a renowned author of fiction about lesbian romance who tragically committed suicide in Paris in 1995, berates the “structural complicity” of social restraints on women (p. 394); in a 1997 essay on “ku'er literature,” author and critic Ji Dawei posits ku'er (a transliteration of “queer”) as a product of Taiwan's “cross-cultural currents” that divests the Anglo-American term of its “derogatory overtones” and provides an alternative to the Chinese term tongzhi (“comrade”), which assumes uniformity of homosexual identity (pp. 410–11). Indigenous, minority, and immigrant experiences are also foregrounded in writings by Paiwan author Liglav A-Wu, Hakka author Li Qiao, and Sinophone Malaysian author Li Yongping. Finally, part 3 includes illuminating dialogues between authors such as Zhu Tianxin and Wu He, as well as a concluding conversation on indigenous literature between Puyuma author Sun Dachuan (aka Palabang) and Tao author Syaman Rapongan, who poignantly describes how he uses his mother tongue to “explicate and manipulate Chinese instead of being manipulated by it” (p. 480).
The Columbia Sourcebook of Literary Taiwan is a true feat of archival compilation. Combining their expertise in East Asian literary history, criticism, fiction, prose, poetry, and drama, the three editors have, with the generous collaboration of many additional translators, produced the most expansive volume documenting the evolution of literary culture in modern Taiwan available in English. With few exceptions, there is remarkable consistency in the translations, given that forty-six translators, mostly scholars based at institutions in North America, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and New Zealand, contributed to the volume. The sourcebook is a crucial index of seismic cultural shifts as they played out from the perspectives of participants who could not necessarily anticipate the momentous changes that were to follow. In this sense, a chronological procession through the volume tracks “the long-term evolution of literary media's social roles through the interactions of micro- and macrolevels of historical contexts” (p. 19), as Chang stresses in the introduction. Scholars are most likely to use it as a reference to initiate further study of individual debates, trends, authors, and literary works, assisted by the helpful source language glossary and author biographies in the appendix. In undergraduate literature courses, selected excerpts can also provide critical contextualization for individual literary works. Whatever the application, the sourcebook should serve as a reminder that Taiwan retains a vibrant, sophisticated literary culture even in the Internet age of digital media.
