Region

| Taiwan | Hong Kong | Diaspora, Exile, Transnational, Sinophone, World Literature |


Taiwan

Au, Chung-to. Modernist Aesthetics in Taiwanese Poetry since the 1950s. Leiden: Brill, 2008.

[Abstract: Much of the previous scholarship on Taiwanese modernist poetry easily falls into ideological arguments. This book participates in the development of an alternative approach to understanding Taiwanese modernist poetry. Dr. Au’s approach emphasizes the diversity and intensity of experiences of place and placelessness in the work of five poets: Lomen, Luo Fu, Rong Zi, Yu Guangzhong and Zheng Chouyu. The phenomenon of placelessness is a problem in all modernity and so modern aesthetics is an outgrowth of modern society’s sense of placelessness. This book not only shows how place becomes placelessness but also analyses Taiwanese modernist poets’ responses to the phenomenon of placelessness. Four kinds of places are examined, namely, the house, the city, homeland and an imagined literary community, in this work. The result is both refreshing and original.]

Allen, Joseph. “From Literature to Lingerie: Classical Chinese Poetry in Taiwan Popular Culture.” In Marc L. Moskowitz, ed., Popular Culture in Taiwan: Charismatic Modernity. New York: Routledge, 2010, 65-85.

Bachner, Andrea. “Cultural Margins, Hybrid Scripts: Bigraphism and Translation in Indigenous Taiwanese Writing.” Journal of World Literature 1, 2 (2016): 226-244.

Bai, Ling. “The Era after Social Diversification: Developments in Taiwanese Poetry 1985-1990.” Trs. Duncan Hewitt and Chu Chiyu. Renditions 35/36 (1991): 294-98.

Balcom, John. “Anthologizing Taiwan: Taiwanese Literature toward the Anglophone World.” In Pei-yin Lin and Wen-chi Li, eds., Taiwanese Literature as World Literature. London: Bloomsbury, 2023, 113-28.

Berry, Michael. A History of Pain: Trauma in Modern Chinese Literature and Film. NY: Columbia University Press, 2008.

[Abstract: The portrayal of historical atrocity in fiction, film, and popular culture can reveal much about the function of individual memory and the shifting status of national identity. In the context of Chinese culture, films such as Hou Hsiao-hsien’s City of Sadness and Lou Ye’s Summer Palace and novels such as Ye Zhaoyan’s Nanjing 1937: A Love Story and Wang Xiaobo’s The Golden Age collectively reimagine past horrors and give rise to new historical narratives. Table of Contents: Prelude: A History of Pain. Part I: Centripetal Trauma: 1. Musha 1930; 2. Nanjing 1937; 3. Taipei 1947. Part II: Centrifugal Trauma: 4. Yunnan 1968; 5. Beijing 1989; Coda: Hong Kong 1997]

—–. “Taiwan Literature in the Post-Martial Law Era.” Kirk A. Denton, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia University Press, 2016, 422-30.

Birch, Cyril. “Images of Suffering in Taiwan Fiction.” In Jeannette L. Faurot, ed. Chinese Fiction from Taiwan: Critical Perspectives. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1980, 71-85.

Braester, Yomi. “Retelling Taiwan: Identity and Dislocation in Post-Chiang Mystery.” In Braester, Witness Against History: Literature, Film, and Public Discourse in Twentieth-Century China. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003, 158-76. Rpt. as “Taiwanese Identity and the Crisis of Memory: Post-Chiang Mystery,” in David Der-wei Wang and Carlos Rojas eds., Writing Taiwan: A New Literary History. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2006, 213-32.

Chang, Bi-yu. “Disclaiming and Renegotiating National Memory: Taiwanese Xiqu and Identity.” In Carsten Storm and Mark Harrison, eds., The Margins of Becoming: Identity and Culture in Taiwan. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2007, 51-68.

—–. “Taiwanese Identity Shift and the Struggle for Cultural Hegemony in the 1990s.” In Chin-Chuan Cheng, I-Chun Wang, and Steven Totosy de Zepetnek, eds. Cultural Discourse in Taiwan. Kaohsiung: Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences, National Sun Yat-sen University, 2009, 30-51.

—–. Place, Identity, and National Imagination in Postwar Taiwan. NY: Routledge, 2015.

[Abstract: In the struggles for political and cultural hegemony that Taiwan has witnessed since the 1980s, the focal point in contesting narratives and the key battlefield in the political debates are primarily spatial and place-based. The major fault line appears to be a split between an imposed identity emphasizing cultural origin (China) and an emphasis on the recovery of place identity of ‘the local’ (Taiwan).Place, Identity and National Imagination in Postwar Taiwan explores the ever-present issue of identity in Taiwan from a spatial perspective, and focuses on the importance of, and the relationship between, state spatiality and identity formation. Taking postwar Taiwan as a case study, the book examines the ways in which the Kuomintang regime naturalized its political control, territorialized the island and created a nationalist geography. In so doing, it examines how, why and to what extent power is exercised through the place-making process and considers the relationship between official versions of ‘ROC geography’ and the islanders’ shifting perceptions of the ‘nation’. In turn, by addressing the relationship between the state and the imagined community, Bi-yu Chang establishes a dialogue between place and cultural identity to analyse the constant changing and shaping of Chinese and Taiwanese identity.]

Chang, Bi-yu and Henning Kloter, eds. Imaging and Imagining Taiwan: Identity Representation and Cultural Politics. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2012.

Chang, Bi-yu and Pei-yin Lin, eds. Positioning Taiwan in a Global Context: Being and Becoming. New York: Routledge, 2019.

Chang, Chiung-fang. “Taiwan Literature: The Next Export Success Story?Sinorama 26, 1 (Jan. 2001).

Chang, Hui-ching and Richard Holt, eds. Language, Politics and Identity in Taiwan: Naming China. Routledge, 2014.

[Abstract: Following the move by Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese Nationalist Party Kuomingtang (KMT) to Taiwan after losing the Chinese civil war to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the late 1940s, and Chiang’s subsequent lifelong vow to reclaim the mainland, “China ” has occupied―if not monopolized―the gaze of Taiwan, where its projected images are reflected. Whether mirror image, shadow, or ideal contrast, China has been, and will continue to be, a key reference point in Taiwan’s convoluted effort to find its identity. Language, Politics and Identity in Taiwan traces the intertwined paths of five sets of names Taiwan has used to name China since the KMT came to Taiwan in 1949: the derogatory “Communist bandits”; the ideologically focused “Chinese Communists”; the seemingly neutral geographical designators “mainland” and “opposite shore/both shores”; and the ethnic and national label “China,” with the official designation, “People’s Republic of China.” In doing so, it explores how Taiwanese identities are constituted and reconstituted in the shifting and switching of names for China; in the application of these names to alternative domains of Taiwanese life; in the waning or waxing of names following tides of history and polity; and in the increasingly contested meaning of names. Through textual analyses of historical archives and other mediated texts and artifacts, the chapters chart Taiwan’s identity negotiation over the past half century and critically evaluate key interconnections between language and politics.]

Chang, Kang-i Sun. “1947, February 28: On Memory and Trauma: From the 228 Incident to the White Terror.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 528-33.

Chang, Shi-kuo. “Realism in Taiwan Fiction: Two Directions.” In Jeannette L. Faurot, ed. Chinese Fiction from Taiwan: Critical Perspectives. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980, 31-42.

Chang, Sung-cheng Yvonne. Modernism and the Nativist Resistance: Contemporary Fiction from Taiwan. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993.

—–. “Beyond Cultural and National Identities: Current Re-evaluation of the Kominka Literature from Taiwan’s Japanese Period.” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 1, 1 (1997): 75-107.

—–. “Elements of Modernism in Fiction from Taiwan.” Tamkang Review 19, 1-4 (Aut. 1988/Sum. 1989): 591-606.

—–. “Modern Taiwanese Fiction from Taiwan.” In Murray Rubinstein, ed., Taiwan: A History, 1600-1994. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1998.

—–. “Modernism and Contemporary Fiction of Taiwan.” In Roger Bauer, Douwe Fokkema, eds., Proceedings of the XIIth Conference of the Inernational Comparative Literature Association: Space and Boundaries of Literature. Munich: Iudicium, 1990, 285-90.

—–. “Three Generations of Taiwan’s Contemporary Women Writers: A Critical Introduction.” In Ann Carver and Sung-cheng Yvonne Chang, eds., Bamboo Shoots After the Rain: Contemporary Stories of Taiwan. NY: The Feminist Press, 1990.

—–. “Taiwanese New Literature and the Colonial Context: A Historical Survey.” In Murray A. Rubinstein, ed. Taiwan: A New History. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1999, 261-74.

—–. “Literature in Post-1949 Taiwan, 1950s to 1980s.” In Murray A. Rubinstein, ed. Taiwan: A New History. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1999, 403-18.

—–. Literary Culture in Taiwan: From Martial Law to Market Law. NY: Columbia UP, 2004.

—–. “Representing Taiwan: Shifting Geopolitical Frameworks.” In David Wang and Carlos Rojas eds., Writing Taiwan: A New Literary History. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2006, 17-25.

—–. “Contexts of Taiwan STudies in the U.S. Academe.” In Chin-Chuan Cheng, I-Chun Wang, and Steven Totosy de Zepetnek, eds. Cultural Discourse in Taiwan. Kaohsiung: Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences, National Sun Yat-sen University, 2009, 10-29.

—–. “Building a Modern Institution of Literature: The Case of Taiwan.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed. A Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2016, 116-33.

—–. “1984, July 21-30: Literary Representations of the White Terror and Rupture in Mid-Twentieth-Century Taiwan.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 771-77.

Chang, Yvonne Sung-Sheng, Michelle Yeh, and Ming-ju Fan, eds. The Columbia Sourcebook of Literary Taiwan. NY: Columbia University Press, 2014.

[Abstract: This sourcebook contains more than 160 documents and writings that reflect the development of Taiwanese literature from the early modern period to the twenty-first century. Selections include seminal essays in literary debates, polemics, and other landmark events; interviews, diaries, and letters by major authors; critical and retrospective essays by influential writers, editors, and scholars; transcripts of historical speeches and conferences; literary-society manifestos and inaugural journal prefaces; and governmental policy pronouncements that have significantly influenced Taiwanese literature. These texts illuminate Asia’s experience with modernization, colonialism, and postcolonialism; the character of Taiwan’s Cold War and post-Cold War cultural production; gender and environmental issues; indigenous movements; and the changes and challenges of the digital revolution. Taiwan’s complex history with Dutch, Spanish, and Japanese colonization; strategic geopolitical position vis-à-vis China, Japan, and the United States; and status as a hub for the East-bound circulation of technological and popular-culture trends make the nation an excellent case study for a richer understanding of East Asian and modern global relations.]

Chang, Wen-chi. “Taiwanese identity in Contemporary Literature.” In Chung-min Chen et al. eds., Ethnicity in Taiwan: Social, Historical, and Cultural Perspectives. Nangang: Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, 1994, 169-87.

Chang, WenHsun. “The Narratable Self: Taiwan Literature and Watakushi Novels.” Taiwan Lit 1, 2 (Fall 2020).

Chen, Aili. The Search for Cultural Identity: Taiwan ‘Hsiang-T’u’ Literature in the Seventies. Ph.d. diss. Columbus: The Ohio State University, 1991.

Chen, Chang-fang and Sung Mei-hwa. “Elements of Change in the Fiction of Taiwan in the 1980s.” The Chinese Pen (Summer 1989): 31-42.

Chen, Chien-chung. “Taiwan Fiction under Japanese Colonial Rule, 1895-1945.” In Shu-mei Shih and Chien-hsin Tsai eds. Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader. NY: Columbia University Press, 2013, 227-41.

Chen, Fangming. “Postmodern or Postcolonial? An Inquiry into Postwar Taiwanese Literary History.” In David Wang and Carlos Rojas eds., Writing Taiwan: A New Literary History. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2006, 26-50.

Chen, Jo-hsi. “Literary Formosa.” The China Quarterly 15 (July-Sept, 1963): 75-85.

Chen, Letty Lingchei. Writing Chinese: Reshaping Chinese Cultural Identity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan Publishing, 2006.

—–. “Writing Taiwan’s Fin-de-Siecle Splendor: Zhu Tianwen and Zhu Tianxin.” In Kirk A. Denton, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia University Press, 2016, 363-70.

Chen, Li-fen. Fictionality and Reality in Narrative Discourse: A Reading of Four Contemporary Taiwanese Writers. Ph. D. diss. Seattle: University of Washington, 2000.[chapters on Ch’en Ying-chen, Ch’i-Teng Sheng, Wang Chen-ho, and Wang Wen-hsing; available through Dissertation.com]

—–. “Queering Taiwan: In Search of Nationalism’s Other.” Modern China 37 (2011): 384-421.

[Abstract: This article deals with the formation of Taiwan’s homosexual cultural politics in the 1990s, the impact and implications of which are yet to be examined within the larger context of Taiwan’s cultural and political development and ethnic relationships. It is argued that the rise of this cultural politics is both a reflection and a source of a growing sense of identity crisis on the island. By examining the configurations of “queer” in various discursive domains, this interdisciplinary study seeks to delineate the cross-referencing ideological network of this cultural movement and its entanglement with the complexity of Taiwan’s nationalism. At the same time, to the extent that this movement tends to present itself as a radical politics from a privileged epistemological and cultural standpoint, this claimed radicalism is also scrutinized for its problematics and ironies.]

Chen, Lucy. “Literary Formosa.” In Mark Mancall, ed., Formosa Today. NY, London: Praeger, 1964, 131-41.

Chen, Shao-Hsing. “Diffusion and Acceptance of Modern Artistic and Intellectual Expression in Taiwan.” Studia Taiwanica 2 (1957): 1-6.

Chen, Shou-yi. “Contemporary Literature in Taiwan.” Claremont Quarterly 11, 3 (1964): 50-70.

Chen, Yu-ling. “The State of Taiwan Literature–Feminine, Nativist, and Anti-Colonial Discourse. Tr. Suefen Tsai. Taiwan Literature: English Translation Series 22 (Jan. 2008): 147-53.

Cheng, Chin-Chuan. “Immigrant Brides and Language Problems in Taiwan.” In Chin-Chuan Cheng, I-Chun Wang, and Steven Totosy de Zepetnek, eds. Cultural Discourse in Taiwan. Kaohsiung: Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences, National Sun Yat-sen University, 2009, 161-76.

Cheng, Chin-Chuan, I-Chun Wang, and Steven Totosy de Zepetnek, eds. Cultural Discourse in Taiwan. Kaohsiung: Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences, National Sun Yat-sen University, 2009.

Cheung, Dominic. “The Continuity of Modern Chinese Poetry in Taiwan.” World Literature Today 65, 3 (1991): 399-404.

Chi, Pang Yuan. “Taiwan’s History in Literature.” Solidarity 120 (1988): 51-58.

—–. “Taiwan Literature, 1945-1999.” In Pang-yuan Chi and David Wang, eds., Chinese Literature in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century: A Critical Survey. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2000, 14-30.

Chien, Ying ying. “From Utopian to Dystopian World: Two Faces of Feminism in Contemporary Taiwanese Women’s Fiction.” World Literature Today 68, 1 (1994): 35-42.

Chiu, Kuei fen. “Taking Off: A Feminist Approach to Two Contemporary Women’s Novels in Taiwan.” Tamkang Review 23, 1-4 (1992-1993): 709-33.

—–. “Identity Politics in Contemporary Women’s Novels in Taiwan.” Tamkang Review 30, 2 (Winter 1999): 27-54. Rpt. in Peng-hisang Chen and Whitney Crothers Dilley, eds., Feminism/Femininity in Chinese Literature. Amsterdam,: Rodopi, 2002, 67-86.

—–. “Treacherous Translation: Taiwanese Tactics of Intervention in Transnational Cultural Flows.” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 31, 1 (Jan. 2005): 47-69.

—–. “‘Worlding’ World Literature from the Literary Periphery: Four Taiwanese Models.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 30, no.1  (Spring 2018): 13-41.

—–. “Millennial Writers and the Taiwanese Literary Tradition.” Taiwan Lit 2, 1 (Spring 2021).

—–. “Taiwanese Literature in Two Transnational Contexts: Sinophone Literature and World Literature.” In Pei-yin Lin and Wen-chi Li, eds., Taiwanese Literature as World Literature. London: Bloomsbury, 2023, 19-34.

—–. “Taiwanese Literature in the Early Twenty-First Century.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed., A World History of Chinese Literature. New York: Routledge, 2023, 145-55.

Chong, Ling. “Feminism and Female Taiwan Writers.” In Pang-yuan Chi and David Wang, eds., Chinese Literature in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century: A Critical Survey. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2000, 146-60.

Chou, Ying-hsiung. “Between History and the Unconscious: Contemporary Taiwanese Fiction Revisited.” Tamkang Review 22, 1-4 (1991): 155-76.

Chun, Allen. “The Culture Industry as National Enterprise: The Politics of Heritage in Contemporary Taiwan.” In Virginia R. Dominguez and David Y. H. Wu, eds., From Beijing to Port Moresby: The Politics of National Identity in Cultural Policies. Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1998, 77-113.

Chung, Mingder. The Little Theatre Movement of Taiwan (1980-1989): In Search of Alternative Aesthetics and Politics. Ph.D. diss. NY: New York University, 1992.

“Contemporary Literature in Taiwan.” Special Section of Free China Review 41, 4 (April 1991): 1-47.

Damm, Jens. Ku’er vs. tongzhi – Diskurse der Homosexualität. Über das Entstehen sexueller Identitäten im glokalisierten Taiwan und im postkolonialen Hongkong (Discourses on homosexual identities in Taiwan and Hong Kong). Bochum: Cathay Skripten, Taiwan Studies Series, no. 16, 2000.

[Abstract: During the nineties, two different discourses on homosexual identity have developed in Hong Kong and in Taiwan: a tongzhi-discourse in Hong Kong, which attributes the negative attitude toward homosexuality in modern Chinese societies to the influence of (post)colonialism and appeals for a more tolerant attitude by making frequent and pointed reference to the Chinese tradition of male homosexual relationships. The Taiwanese ku’er (queer) discourse, which regards Taiwanese society as being firmly embedded in a globalized world, may therefore be seen as resulting from a blend of glocalized influences and a more tolerant attitude is only possible in a pluralistic society where the flow of gender and desire is recognized. In the paper, two recently published works are presented as examples for the two discourses: Post-Colonial ‘Tongzhi’, written by the Hong Kong sociologist Zhou Huashan and Queer Archipelago: A Reader of the Queer Discourses in Taiwan compiled by the Taiwanese author of belles-lettres and ku’er-theoretician Ji Dawei. It is also shown that the differences in the discourses may be traced back to the drifting apart of the political and social scenarios in Taiwan and Hong Kong.]

Dawley, Evan. Becoming Taiwanese: Ethnogenesis in a Colonial City, 1880s-1950s. Cambridge: Harvard Asia Center, 2019.

[Abstract: What does it mean to be Taiwanese? This question sits at the heart of Taiwan’s modern history and its place in the world. In contrast to the prevailing scholarly focus on Taiwan after 1987, Becoming Taiwanese examines the important first era in the history of Taiwanese identity construction during the early twentieth century, in the place that served as the crucible for the formation of new identities: the northern port city of Jilong (Keelung). Part colonial urban social history, part exploration of the relationship between modern ethnicity and nationalism, Becoming Taiwanese offers new insights into ethnic identity formation. Dawley examines how people from China’s southeastern coast became rooted in Taiwan; how the transfer to Japanese colonial rule established new contexts and relationships that promoted the formation of distinct urban, ethnic, and national identities; and how the so-called retrocession to China replicated earlier patterns and reinforced those same identities. Based on original research in Taiwan and Japan, and focused on the settings and practices of social organizations, religion, and social welfare, as well as the local elites who served as community gatekeepers, Becoming Taiwanese fundamentally challenges our understanding of what it means to be Taiwanese.]

Diamond, Catherine Theresa Cleeves. The Role of Cross-cultural Adaptation in the Little Theatre Movement in Taiwan. Ph.D. diss. Seattle: University of Washington, 1993.

Dluhošová, Táňa. “Early Postwar Debates on Taiwan and Taiwanese Literature.” In Ann Helen and Scott Sommers, eds., Becoming Taiwan: From Colonialism to Democracy. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2010, 181-97.

—–. “Taiwan funü in the Early Post-war Period (1945-49).” Oriental Archive 79, 3 (2011): 357-77.

—–. “Does ‘Dominating’ Mean ‘Mainstream’?–Official Taiwan Literature in 1945-47.” Studia Orientalia Slovaca 11, 1 (2012).

Dutrait, Noel. “Four Taiwanese Writers on Themselves Chu T’ien-wen, Su Wei Chen, Cheng Chiung-ming and Ye Lingfang respond to our questionnaire.” China Perspectives 17 (May/June 1998).

Faurot, Jeannette L., ed. Chinese Fiction from Taiwan: Critical Perspectives. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1980.

Fix, Douglas L. Conscripted Writers: Collaborating Tales?: Taiwanese War Stories. Cambridge, MA: Fairbank Center, 1994.

—–. “Conscripted Writers, Collaborating Tales? Taiwanese War Stories.” Harvard Studies on Taiwan: Papers of the Taiwan Studies Workshop 2 (1998): 19-41.

Fleming, Brent Leonard. Theatre Management Procedures: An Operations Manual for the Cultural Center Theatres in Taiwan, the Republic of China. Ph.D.diss. Texas Technical University, 1987.

Gaffric, Gwennaël. “Settling in the World Republic of Letters: Taiwanese Literature in French.” In Pei-yin Lin and Wen-chi Li, eds., Taiwanese Literature as World Literature. London: Bloomsbury, 2023, 129-42.

Goldblatt, Howard. “Taiwan Literature in the People’s Republic of China.” Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association 16, 2 (1981): 57-66.

Haddon, Rosemary M. “Mimesis and Motivation in Taiwan Colonial Fiction.” B.C. Asian Review 1 (1987)

—–. “Taiwan Xiangtu wenxue: The Sojourner-Narrator.” B.C. Asian Review 3-4 (1990).

—–. Nativist Fiction in China and Taiwan: A Thematic Survey. Ph.D. diss. Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 1993.

—–. “Chinese Nativist Literature of the 1920s: The Sojourner-Narrator.” Modern Chinese Literature 8, no. 1-2 (1994): 97-124.

—–. “T’ai-wan hsin wen-hsueh and the Evolution of a Journal: T’ai-wan min-pao.” Tamkang Review 25, 2 (1994): 1-35.

—–. “Introduction: Taiwanese Nativism and the Colonial/Post-Colonial Discourse.” In Rosemary Haddon, tr./ed , Oxcart: Nativist Stories from Taiwan, 1934-1977. Dortmund: Projekt Verlag, 1996, v-xxv.

—–. “Engendering Women: Taiwan’s Recent Fiction by Women.” In Antonia Finnan and Ann McLaren, eds. Dress, Sex and Text in Chinese Culture. Clayton, Australia: Monash Asia Institute, 1999, 212-24.

Hammer, Christiane. Reif für die Insel. Ein Streifzug durch die taiwanesische Literature in deutscher Übersetzung. Mit einer Auswahlbibliographie (A Survey of Taiwanese literature in German translation. With a selective bibliography). Bochum: Cathay Skripten, Taiwan Studies Series, no. 14, 1999.

[Abstract: Compared with the literature from the Chinese mainland, modern texts from Taiwan in German translations lead a far more marginal life on Germany’s book market. This is not so much attributable to a lack of quality, but correlates to the minor importance Taiwan studies enjoy in the field of German sinology, in stark contrast to the situation, e.g., in the USA. However, quite a number of translations are hidden in various theses and studies, the so-called ‘grey literature’. This survey examines some of these semi-official publications, most of which were initiated by the late Professor Helmut Martin, and considers whether they provide useful references to interesting authors or even raw matereial which could be transformed into translations on a commercial scale.]

Hegel, Robert E. “The Search for Identity in Fiction from Taiwan.” In Robert Hegel and Richard Hessney, eds., Expressions of Self in Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia UP, 1985. 342-360.

Hillenbrand, Margaret. “GIs and the City: The Vietnam War in Taiwanese Fiction of the 1970s and 1980s.” Asian Studies Review 25, 4 (2001).

—–. “Trauma and the Politics of Identity: Form and Function in the Fictional Narratives of the February 28th Incident.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 17, 2 (Fall 2005): 49-89.

—–. “The National Allegory Revisited: Writing Private and Public in Contemporary Taiwan.” positions: east asia cultures critique 14, 3 (2006): 633-662. [Project Muse link]

—–. Literature, Modernity, and the Practice of Resistance: Japanese and Taiwanese Fiction, 1960-1990. Leiden: Brill, 2007. [MCLC Resource Center review by Bert Scruggs]

[Abstract: This book is a cross-cultural, interdisciplinary study which compares responses to modernity in the literary cultures of Japan and Taiwan, 1960-1990. Moving beyond the East-West framework that has traditionally dominated comparative enquiry, the volume sets out to explore contemporary East Asian literature on its own terms. As such, it belongs to the newly emerging area of inter-Asian cultural studies, but is the first full-length monograph to explore this field through the prism of literature. The book combines close readings of paradigmatic texts with in-depth analysis of the historical, social, and ideological contexts in which these works are situated, and explores the form and function of literary practice within the “miracle” societies of industrialized East Asia.]

Hsia, Yu, et al. “Cross it Out, Cross it Out, Cross it Out: Erasurist Poetry from Taiwan’s Poetry Now (Issue #9, Feb 2012).” Asymptote (April 2012).

Hsiao, Li-chun. The Soldier-Writer, the Expatriate, and Cold War Modernism in Taiwan: Freedom in the Trenches. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2022.

[Abstract: [The author] argues that what appeared to be a “genesis” of new literature engendered by the modernist movement in postwar Taiwan was made possible only through the “splendid isolation” within the Cold War world order sustaining the bubble in which “Free China” lived on borrowed time. The book explores the trenches of freedom in whose confines the soldier-poets’ were surrealistically acquiesced to roam free under the aegis of “pure literature” and the buffer zone created by the US presence in Taiwan—and the modernists’ expatriate writing from America—that aided their moderated deviance from the official line. It critically examines the anti-establishment character and gesture in the movement phase in terms of its entanglements with the state apparatus and the US-aided literary establishment. Taiwan’s modernists counterbalance their retrospectively perceived excess and nuanced forms of exit with a series of spiritual as well as actual returns, upon which earlier traditionalist undercurrents would surface. This modernism’s mixed legacies, with its aesthetic avant-gardism marrying politically moderate or conservative penchants, date back to its bifurcated mode of existence and operation of separating the realm of the aesthetic from everything else in life during the Cold War.]

Hsiau, A-Chin. Contemporary Taiwanese Cultural Nationalism. NY: Routledge, 2000.

—–. “The Indigenization of Taiwanese Literature: Historical Narrative, Strategic Essentialism, and State Violence.” In John Makeham and A-chin Hsiau, eds. Cultural, Ethnic, and Political Nationalism in Contemporary Taiwan: Bentuhua. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, 125-55.

—–. Politics and Cultural Nativism in 1970s Taiwan: Youth, Narrative, Nationalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021.

[Abstract: In the aftermath of 1949, Taiwan’s elites saw themselves as embodying China in exile both politically and culturally. The island—officially known as the Republic of China—was a temporary home to await the reconquest of the mainland. Taiwan, not the People’s Republic, represented China internationally until the early 1970s. Yet in recent decades Taiwan has increasingly come to see itself as a modern nation-state. A-chin Hsiau traces the origins of Taiwanese national identity to the 1970s, when a surge of domestic dissent and youth activism transformed society, politics, and culture in ways that continue to be felt. After major diplomatic setbacks at the beginning of the 1970s posed a serious challenge to Kuomintang authoritarian rule, a younger generation without firsthand experience of life on the mainland began openly challenging the status quo. Hsiau examines how student activists, writers, and dissident researchers of Taiwanese anticolonial movements, despite accepting Chinese nationalist narratives, began to foreground Taiwan’s political and social past and present. Their activism, creative work, and historical explorations played pivotal roles in bringing to light and reshaping indigenous and national identities. In so doing, Hsiau contends, they laid the basis for Taiwanese nationalism and the eventual democratization of Taiwan.]

Hsieh, Hsin-Chin Evelyn. “Connecting the Local and the Global: the Association for Taiwan Literature.” International Journal of Taiwan Studies 3, 2 (2020): 331-41.

[Abstract: The Association for Taiwan Literature was founded in 2016 as a non-profit association by researchers and students from institutions dedicated to Taiwan literature in Taiwan. The aims and objectives of the association are to promote research, teaching, creative writing, translations, and international collaboration related to Taiwan literature. This report will demonstrate and evaluate multiple strategies and projects adopted by the association, including the development of intellectual and academic communities, industry–academia cooperation, the Toward Taiwan ‘New’ Literature series, and global Taiwan studies to create a sustainable community of Taiwan literature studies working outside of regular academic channels to build a collaborative network in Taiwan and beyond.]

Hsu, Chien-jung. The Construction of National Identity in Taiwan’s Media, 1896-2012. Leiden: Brill, 2014.

[Abstract: National identity has been an ongoing political issue in Taiwan since the late-1890s. The Construction of National Identity in Taiwan1s Media, 1896-2012 breaks new ground with the most comprehensive analysis of the development of Taiwan1s media and the construction of national identity in Taiwan1s media. Using a variety of media contents including newspapers, opposition magazines, broadcasting radio, news TV stations and the Internet as well as numerous interviews with journalists, senior media staffs and academics, Dr Hsu provides many original insights into the formation of national identity in Taiwan’s media. Taiwan’s media began to demonstrate a variety of new identities under democratization. Part of this change responded to market conditions as a majority of Taiwan’s population stressed their Taiwan identity.]

Hsu, Vivian. “Universal Vision in Contemporary Taiwan Literature.” Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association 16, 3 (1981): 19-40

Hsu, Wen Hsiung. “Purism and Alienation in Recent Taiwanese Fiction.” In Bjorn Jernudd and Michael Shapiro eds., The Politics of Language Purism. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1989, 197-210.

Huang, Hans Tao-Ming. Queer Politics and Sexual Modernity in Taiwan. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2011.

[Abstract: This book delineates the history and politics of gender and sexuality since postwar Taiwan. Tracking the interface between queerness and national culture, it underscores the imbrications of male homosexuality, prostitution and feminism within the modernizing process and offers a trenchant critique of the violence of sexual modernity.]

Huang, Heng-ch’iu. “Relections on Hakka Literature in Taiwan.” Tr. Yingtsih Huang. Taiwan Literature: English Translation Series 16 (2005): 171-84.

Huang, Peter I-min. Linda Hogan and Contemporary Taiwanese Writers: An Ecocritical Study of Indigeneities and Environment. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2016.

Huang, Phyllis Yu-ting. “Mainlander Writings in Taiwan Literature: Predicaments and Potential.” Taiwan Lit 1, 2 (Fall 2020).

Huang, Ying-che. “From Taiwan’s Literature to Taiwanese Literature: A Paradigm Shift in Japanese Translation.” Tr. Sherlon Chi-yin Ip. In Pei-yin Lin and Wen-chi Li, eds., Taiwanese Literature as World Literature. London: Bloomsbury, 2023, 157-70.

Huang, [Phyllis] Yu-ting. “The Archepelagos of Taiwan Literature: Comparative Methods and Island Writings in Taiwan.” In Shu-mei Shih and Ping-hui Liao, eds., Comparatizing Taiwan. London: Routledge, 2015, 80-99.

—–. Literary Representations of “Mainlanders” in Taiwan: Becoming Sinophone. London: Routledge, 2022.

[Abstract: This book examines literary representations of mainlander identity articulated by Taiwan’s second-generation mainlander writers, who share the common feature of emotional ambivalence between Taiwan and China. Closely analyzing literary narratives of Chinese civil war migrants and their descendants in Taiwan, a group referred to as “mainlanders” (waishengren), this book demonstrates that these Chinese migrants’ ideas of “China” and “Chineseness” have adapted through time with their gradual settlement in the host land. Drawing upon theories of Sinophone Studies and memory studies, this book argues that during the three decades in which Taiwan moved away from the Kuomintang’s authoritarian rule to a democratic society, mainlander identity was narrated as a transformation from a diasporic Chinese identity to a more fluid and elusive Sinophone identity. Characterized by the features of cultural hybridity and emotional in-betweenness, mainlander identity in the eight works explored contests the existing Sinocentric discourse of Chineseness.]

Hung, Celina Tzu-hui. “The Promise and Peril of Translation in the Taiwan Literature Award for Migrants.” In Andrea Bachner, Howard Chiang, and Yu-lin Lee, eds., Sinoglossia. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2023, 173-99.

Hung, Eva and David E. Pollard, eds. “Contemporary Taiwan Literature.” Renditions 35/36 (1991).

Kim, Jina E. Urban Modernities in Colonial Korea and Taiwan. Leiden: Brill, 2019.

[Abstract: Urban Modernities reconsiders Japanese colonialism in Korea and Taiwan through a relational study of modernist literature and urban aesthetics from the late colonial period. By charting intra-Asian and transregional circulations of writers, ideas, and texts, it reevaluates the dominant narrative in current scholarship that presents Korea and Taiwan as having vastly different responses to and experiences of Japanese colonialism. By comparing representations of various colonial spaces ranging from the nation, the streets, department stores, and print spaces to underscore the shared experiences of the quotidian and the poetic, Jina E. Kim shows how the culture of urban modernity enlivened networks of connections between the colonies and destabilized the metropole-colony relationship, thus also contributing to the broader formation of global modernism.]

Kinkley, Jeffrey. “Mainland Chinese Scholars’ Images of Contemporary Taiwan Literature.” In Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang and Michelle Yeh, eds., Contemporary Chinese Literature: Crossing the Boundaries. Special issue of Literature East and West. Austin, TX: Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, 1995, 25-42.

Kleeman, Faye Yuan. 2003. Under an Imperial Sun: Japanese Colonial Literature of Taiwan and the South. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

—–. “Off the Beaten Path: (Post)-Colonial Travel Writings on Taiwan.” Studia Orientalia Slovaca 11, 1 (2012).

Klöter, Henning. “What Is the Mainstream in Taiwanese Literature? An Introduction.” Studia Orientalia Slovaca 11, 1 (2012).

Ko, Ch’ing-ming. “Modernism and Its Discontents: Taiwan Literature in the 1960s.” In Pang-yuan Chi and David Wang, eds., Chinese Literature in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century: A Critical Survey. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2000, 76-95.

Ku, Tim-hung. “Modernism in Modern Poetry of Taiwan, ROC: A Comparative Perspective.” Tamkang Review 18 (1987/88): 125-39.

Kung, Sze-wen. Translation of Contemporary Taiwan Literature in a Cross-Cultural Context: A Translation Studies Perspective. Routledge, 2021.

[Abstract: explores the social, cultural, and linguistic implications of translation of Taiwan literature for transnational cultural exchange. It demonstrates principally how asymmetrical cultural relationships, mediation processes, and ideologies of the translation players constitute the culture-specific translation activity as a highly contested site, where translation can reconstruct and rewrite the literature and the culture it represents. Four main theoretical themes are explored in relation to such translation activity: sociological studies, cultural and rewriting studies, English as a lingua franca, and social and performative linguistics. These offer insightful perspectives on the translation as an interpretive encounter between not only two languages, two cultural systems and assumptions taking place, but also among various translation mediators.]

Kwan-Terry, John. “Modernism and Tradition in Some Recent Chinese Verse.” Tamkang Review 3, 2 (1972): 189-202.

Lai, Ming-yan. Nativism and Modernity: Cultural Contestations in China and Taiwan under Global Capitalism. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2008.

[Abstract: Comparative study of contemporary nativist literary and cultural movements in China and Taiwan. Nativism and Modernity is the first comparative study of xiangtu nativism in Taiwan and xungen nativism in China. It offers a new critical perspective on these two important literary and cultural movements in contemporary Chinese contexts and shows how nativism can be a vital form of place-based oppositional practice under global capitalism. While nativism has often been viewed in nostalgic terms, Ming-yan Lai instead focuses on the structural implications of nativist oppositional claims and their transformations of marginality into alternative discursive spaces and practices. Through contextual analysis and close readings of key texts, Lai addresses interdisciplinary issues of modernity and critically explores the two nativist discourses’ various engagements with power relations covering a multitude of social differentiations, including nation, class, gender, and ethnicity.]

Lancashire, Edel Marie. Concord and Discord in the World of Literature in Taiwan, 1949-1971: A Selective Study of Writers’ associations, Literary Movements and Controversial Writers. Ph.D. thesis. London: School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London,1981.

—–. “The Lock of the Heart Controversy in Taiwan, 1962-1963: A Question of Artistic Freedom and a Writer’s Social Responsibility.” The China Quarterly (Sept. 1985): 462-488.

Lau, Joseph. “Echoes of the May Fourth Movement in Taiwan Hsiang-t’u Fiction.” In Hung-mao Tien, ed., Mainland China, Taiwan and US Policy. Cambridge, MA: OG Publishers, 1983, 135-50.

Laureillard, Marie. “La poésie visuelle taiwanaise: un retour réflexif sur l’écriture.” Transtext(e)s Transculture: Journal of Global Cultural Studies 2 (Jan. 2007).

Lee, Leo Ou-fan. “Modernism and Romanticism in Taiwan Fiction.” In Jeannette L. Faurot, ed. Chinese Fiction from Taiwan: Critical Perspectives. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1980, 6-30.

—–. “Taiwanese Literature-Chinese Literature? Research Topics of the Nineties Concerning the Colonial Period and Post-war Development.” Asiatica Venetiana 2 (1997): 105-116.

—–. “Last Rehearsals, Waiting in the Wings–Taiwan’s Cultural Criticism of the Nineties.” In Raoul Findeisen and Robert Gassmann, eds., Autumn Floods: Essays in Honour of Marian Galik. Bern: Peter Lang, 1997, 447-58.

—–. “A New Proximity: Chinese Literature in the People’s Republic and on Taiwan.” In H. Goldblatt, ed., Worlds Apart: Recent Chinese Writing and Its Audiences. Armonk, NY : M. E. Sharpe, 1990. 29-43.

Lee, Yu-lin. Writing Taiwan: A Study of Taiwan’s Nativist Literature. VDM verlag, 2008.

—–. “Linguistic Flows, Subjectivity in Cross-Writing, and Language Experiments in Modern Taiwan Literature.” In Chin-Chuan Cheng, I-Chun Wang, and Steven Totosy de Zepetnek, eds. Cultural Discourse in Taiwan. Kaohsiung: Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences, National Sun Yat-sen University, 2009, 131-60.

Leroux, Alain. “Poetry Movements in Taiwan from the 1950s to the late 1970s: Break and Continuities.” China Perspectives 68 (2007): 56-65.

Li, Ch’iao. “Bickering about the Meaning of ‘Taiwanese Literature.'” Tr. Robert Smitheram. Taiwan Literature, English Translation Series 1 (Aug. 1996).

Liao, Hsien-hao. “From Central Kingdom to Orphan of Asia: The Transformation of Identity in Modern Taiwanese Literature in the five Major Literary Debates.” In Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang and Michelle Yeh, eds., Contemporary Chinese Literature: Crossing the Boundaries. Special issue of Literature East and West. Austin, TX: Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, 1995, 106-26.

—–. “Becoming Cyborgian: Postmodernism and Nationalism in Contemporary Taiwan.” In Xudong Zhang and Arif Dirlik, eds., Postmodernism and China. Durham: Duke UP, 2000, 175-201.

Liao, Ping-hui. “The Case of the Emergent Cultural Criticism Columns in Taiwan’s Newspaper Literary Supplements: Global/Local Dialectics in Contemporary Taiwanese Public Culture.” In Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake, eds., Global/local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996, 337-47.

—–. “From Romancing the State to Romancing the Store: Further Elaborations of Butterfly Motifs in Contemporary Taiwan Literature.” In Carlos Rojas and Eileen Cheng-yin Chow, eds., Rethinking Chinese Popular Culture: Cannibalizations of the Canon. NY: Routledge, 2009, 32-47.

Lifshey, Adam. “Translating Taiwan Southward.” In Bi-yu Chang and Pei-yin Lin, eds. Positioning Taiwan in a Global Context: Being and Becoming. New York: Routledge, 2019, 30-44.

Lin, Esther. “Ecrire en Japonais: Les ecrivains Taiwanais des annees 1930 et 1940.” In Isabelle Rabut, ed., Les belles infideles dans l’empire du milieu: Problematique et pratiques de la traduction dans le monde Chinois moderne. Paris: You Feng, 2010, 224-38.

Lin Jui-ming. “Literature Originates From the Land and People.”Tr. Jenn-Shann Jack Lin. Taiwan Literature, English Translation Series 4 (1999): 3-8.

Lin, Julia C. Essays on Contemporary Chinese Poetry. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1985.

Lin, Pei-Yin. “Negotiating Colonialism: Taiwanese Literature During the Japanese Occupation.” IIAS Newsletter 38 (Sept. 2005): 20.

—–. “Memory, History, and Identity: Representations of the February 28th Incident in Taiwanese Literature.” In Evolving Cultural Memory in China and Her Neighbours. Hong Kong: Education Press, 2008, 306-335.

—–. “Cultural Memory and Identity in Taiwanese Fiction of the Twentieth Century.” In Cultural Memory and Chinese Society. Malaysia: University of Malaya, 2008, 111-127.

—–. “Nativist Rhetoric in Contemporary Taiwan.” In Chin-Chuan Cheng, I-Chun Wang, and Steven Totosy de Zepetnek, eds. Cultural Discourse in Taiwan. Kaohsiung: Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences, National Sun Yat-sen University, 2009, 52-77.

—–. “Remaking ‘Taiwan’: Literary Representations of the 2.28 Incident by Lin Yaode and Li Qiao.” In Ann Heytlen and Scott Sommers, eds., Becoming Taiwan: From Colonialism to Democracy. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 2010, 63-81.

—–. “Writing Beyond Boudoirs: Sinophone Literature by Female Writers in Contemporary Taiwan.” In Shu-mei Shih and Chien-hsin Tsai eds. Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader. NY: Columbia University Press, 2013, 255-69.

—–. “Positioning ‘Taiwanese Literature’ to the World: Taiwan as Represented and Perceived in English Translation.” In Bi-yu Chang and Pei-yin Lin, eds. Positioning Taiwan in a Global Context: Being and Becoming. New York: Routledge, 2019, 13-29.

—–. “1921, November 10: Clinical Diagnosis for Taiwan.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 271-77.

—–. “From Indigenization to the World: Reflections on the Themes and Methodologies in Recent Taiwanese Literary Studies.” Archiv orientální 89, 2 (2021): 413-27. 

—–. “Worlding Modalities of Taiwanese Literature: Family Saga, Autobiographical Narrative, and Bildungsroman.” In Pei-yin Lin and Wen-chi Li, eds., Taiwanese Literature as World Literature. London: Bloomsbury, 2023, 51-67.

Lin, Pei-yin and Weipin Tsai, ed. Print, Profit, and Perception: Ideas, Information and Knowledge in Chinese Societies, 1895-1949. Leiden: Brill, 2014.

[Abstract: examines the dynamic cross-cultural exchanges occurring in China and Taiwan from the first Sino-Japanese War to the mid-twentieth century. Drawing examples from various genres, this interdisciplinary volume presents nine empirically grounded case studies on the growth in the production, dissemination and consumption of texts,which lay behind a dramatic expansion of knowledge. The chapters collectively address the co-existence of globalization and localization processes in the period. By taking into account intra-Asian cultural encounters and tracing the multiple competing forces encountered by many, this book offers a fresh and compelling take on how individuals and social groups participated in transnational conceptual flows. Contributors include: Paul Bailey, Che-chia Chang, Elizabeth Emrich, Tze-ki Hon, Max K.W. Huang, Mei-e Huang, Mike Shi-chi Lan, Pei-yin Lin, and Weipin Tsai.]

Lin, Peiyin and Wen-chi Li, eds. Taiwanese Literature as World Literature. London: Bloomsbury, 2023. [MCLC Resource Center review by Lingchei Letty Chen]

[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 more systematically introduced to world readers through translation. Over the past few decades, Taiwanese authors and their translated works have participated in global conversations, such as those on climate change, the “post-truth” era, and ethnic and gender equality. Bringing together scholars and translators from Europe, North America, and East Asia, the volume focuses on three interrelated themes-the framing and worlding ploys of Taiwanese literature, Taiwanese writers’ experience of transculturation, and politics behind translating Taiwanese literature. It aims to stimulate new ways of conceptualizing Taiwanese literature, demonstrate remarkable cases of Taiwanese authors’ co-option of world trends in their Taiwan-concerned writing, and explore its readership and dissemination.]

Lin, Sylvia Li-chun. “Two Texts to a Story: White Terror in Taiwan.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 16, 1 (Spring 2004): 65-114.

—–. “Toward a New Identity: Nativism and Popular Music in Taiwan.” China Information 17, 2 (2003): 83-107.

—–. Representing Atrocity in Taiwan: The 2/28 Incident and White Terror in Fiction and Film. NY: Columbia University Press, 2007. [publisher’s blurb]

Lin, Yaofu. “Toward a Version of China: The Taiwan Experience.” Surfaces 5 (1995).

Liou, Liang-ya. “Gender Crossing and Decadence in Taiwan Fiction at the Fin-de-siecle.” In John C. Hawley ed., Post-colonial and Queer Theories: Intersections and Essays. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001. 71-86.

Literature.” The Republic of China Yearbook–Taiwan, 2001. [decent overview of Taiwan literature]

Liu, Joyce C. “Re-staging Cultural Memories in Contemporary Theatre in Taiwan: Wang Qimei, Stanley Lai, and Lin Huaimin.” In Steven Totosy de Zepetnek and Jennifer W. Jay, eds., East Asian Cultural and Historical Perspectives: Histories and Society, Culture and Literatures. Edmonton: Research Institute for Comparative Literature and Cross-Cultural Studies, University of Alberta, 1997, 267-78.

—–. “The Importance of Being Perverse: China and Taiwan, 1931-1937.” In David Wang and Carlos Rojas eds., Writing Taiwan: A New Literary History. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2006, 93-112.

Liu, Kenneth S. H. “Publishing Taiwan: A Survey of Publications of Taiwanese Literature in English Translation.” In Anna Guttman, Michel Hockx and George Paizis, eds., The Global Literary Field. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006, 200-227.

Liu, Yi-chen. “Reading Taiwan through Japanese and French Literatures: The Surrealism of Le Moulin Poetry Society.” Tr. Blake Brownrigg. In Pei-yin Lin and Wen-chi Li, eds., Taiwanese Literature as World Literature. London: Bloomsbury, 2023, 69-80.

Lu, Han-hsiu. “The Line Graph of Memory: The Return Road to One’s Hometown.” Tr. John Balcolm. Taiwan Literature: English Translation Series 22 (Jan. 2008): 3-8.

Lupke, Christopher. Modern Chinese Literature in the Post-Colonial Diaspora. Ph.D. diss. Ithaca: Cornell University, 1993.

—–. “Xia Ji’an’s (T.A. Hsia) Critical Bridge to Modernism in Taiwan.” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 4, 1 (2000): 35-64.

—–. “The Taiwan Modernists.” In Joshua Mostow, ed, and Kirk A. Denton, China section, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literature. NY: Columbia UP, 2003, 481-87.

—–. “The Taiwan Nativists.” In Joshua Mostow, ed, and Kirk A. Denton, China section, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literature. NY: Columbia UP, 2003, 502-508.

—–. “Cold War Fiction from Taiwan and the Modernists.” In Kirk A. Denton, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia University Press, 2016, 250-57.

—–. “Nativism and Localism in Taiwanese Literature.” Kirk A. Denton, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia University Press, 2016, 258-66.

—–. “1966, October 10: Modernism versus Nativism in 1960s Taiwan.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 669-74.

Makeham, John and A-chin Hsiau, eds. Cultural, Ethnic, and Political Nationalism in Contemporary Taiwan: Bentuhua. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

Malmqvist, Goran. “On the Development of Modern Taiwanese Poetry.” Archiv Orientalni 67, 3 (1999): 311-22.

Marijnissen, Silvia. “‘Made Things’: Serial Form in Modern Poetry from Taiwan.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 13, 2 (Fall 2001): 172-206.

Martin, Fran. Situating Sexualities: Queer Narratives in 1990s Taiwanese Fiction and Film. Ph. D. diss. Melbourne: University of Melbourne, 2000.

—–. Situating Sexualities: Queer Representations in Taiwanese Fiction, Film and Public Culture. HK: University of Hong Kong Press, 2003. [reviewed by Kam Louie in Intersections 10 (Aug. 2004)].

Martin, Helmut. The History of Taiwanese Literature: Towards Cultural-Political Identity. Views from Taiwan, China, Japan and the West. Bochum: Ruhr University, 1995.

—–. “The History of Taiwanese Literature.” Chinese Studies 14, 1 (June 1996): 1-51.

McArthur, Charles. ‘Taiwanese Literature’ after the Nativist Movement: Construction of a Literary Identity Apart from a Chinese Model. Ph. D. diss. Austin: University of Texas, 1999.

Mei, Wen-li. “The Intellectual in Formosa.” The China Quarterly (July/Sept 1978): 65-74.

Møller-Olsen, Astrid. Sensing the Sinophone: Urban Memoryscapes in Contemporary Fiction. Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2021.

[Abstract: Through an original framework of literary sensory studies, this monograph provides a comparative analysis of how six contemporary works of Sinophone fiction reimagine the links between the self and the city, the past and the present, as well as the physical and the imaginary. It explores the connection between elusive memories and material cityscapes through the matrix of the senses. Joining recent efforts to imagine world literature beyond the international, Sensing the Sinophone engages in a triangular comparison of fiction from Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Taipei—three Sinophone cities, each with its own strong urban identity thatc comes with unique cultural and linguistic hybridities.]

Moskowitz, Marc L. ed. Popular Culture in Taiwan: Charismatic Modernity. NY: Routledge, 2010.

Neder, Christina and Ines Susanne Schilling, eds. Transformation! Innovation? Perspectives on Taiwan Culture. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2003.

Passi, Frederica. “Voices from Alternative Literary Fields: Translating Taiwanese Literature into Italian.” In Pei-yin Lin and Wen-chi Li, eds., Taiwanese Literature as World Literature. London: Bloomsbury, 2023, 143-56.

P’eng Jui-chin. “The Primary Issue for Taiwan Literature is Identifying with the Land.” Tr. Mabel Lee. Taiwan Literature, English Translation Series 4 (1999): 9-12.

—–. “The Characteristics of Taiwan Hakka Writers and Their Works.” Tr. John Crespi. Taiwan Literature: English Translation Series 16 (2005): 185-202.

Peng, Hsiao-yen. “Seven Decades of Taiwan Literature: An Outline.” In Steven Totosy de Zepetnek and Jennifer W. Jay, eds., East Asian Cultural and Historical Perspectives: Histories and Society, Culture and Literatures. Edmonton: Research Institute for Comparative Literature and Cross-Cultural Studies, University of Alberta, 1997, 313-21.

—–. “From Anti-Imperialism to Post-Colonialism: Taiwan Fiction Since the 1977 Nativist Literature Debate.” In Kwok-kan Tam et al., eds., Sights of Contestation: Localism, Globalism and Cultural Production in Asia and the Pacific. HK: The Chinese University Press, 2002, 57-78.

—–. “Historical Revisionism in Taiwanese Literature and Culture: A Post-Martial Law Phenomenon.” In Christine Neder and Ines Susanne Schilling, eds., Transformation! Innovation? Perspectives on Taiwan Culture. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2003, 13-28.

Rawnsley, Ming-Yeh. Cultural and Social Change in Taiwan: Society, Cinema and Theatre. NY: Routledge, 2011.

[Abstract: From a Japanese colony to an authoritarian regime to a new democracy, Taiwanese society has gone through many phases of social transition since 1945. This book examines the processes of cultural, social and political transition in Taiwan since 1945, investigating their impact on the Taiwanese cultural industries, with a particular focus on cinema and theatre, and showing how changes in cinema and theatre illustrate the broader cultural, social and political changes taking place. It sets out the history of the development of Taiwanese theatre and cinema since the 1930s, and relates this to broader changes within Taiwanese society. It analyses the socio-politics of Taiwanese-language cinema, and the impact of language policies including the government’s encouragement and promotion of Mandarin in the 1960s. Important issues are considered, notably the modernization and commercialization of cinema and theatre in Taiwan, focusing in particular on Taiwanese produced gangster movies, and also questions of liberalization and democratization, especially the new wave of independent cinema that arrived in the mid 1980s. The book includes interviews with important movie directors, actors, producers, industry workers and critics, including Chen Qiu-yan and Huang Jian-ye. Overall, it provides a full account of cultural, political and social change in Taiwan over the last eighty years, and its relationship with Taiwanese cinema and theatre.]

Research Unit on Taiwanese Culture and Literature (Ruhr University Bochum)

Riep, Steven. “Piecing Together the Past: The Notion of Recovery in Fiction and Film from Taiwan.” Modern China 38, 2 (March 2012): 199-232.

[Abstract: Writers and filmmakers in Taiwan have sought to use the narrative techniques of classic detective fiction to recover events of the Nationalist government-imposed White Terror of the early 1950s to bring the once-concealed past to light. Fiction writer Chen Yingzhen (Ch’en Ying-chen) pioneered this technique in short fiction written in 1983 to bring before the public the events of the White Terror and to consider how guilt for the atrocities should be affixed. Wan Jen’s (Wan Ren) 1995 feature film Super Citizen Ko explores possibilities for memorialization and the notion of victimhood in its recovery of the Nationalist repression of progressive political movements and its impact on a former political prisoner and his family. Finally, Tseng Wen-Chen (Zeng Wenzhen) in her documentary Spring: The Story of Xu Jinyu offers a portrait of a woman White Terror survivor turned political activist living in an era when the White Terror has been commemorated but remains poorly understood by the younger generation.]

Rojas, Carlos. “Worlding Taiwan: Taiwanese Literature’s Contingent Constructions.” In Pei-yin Lin and Wen-chi Li, eds., Taiwanese Literature as World Literature. London: Bloomsbury, 2022, 35-50.

Ross, Timothy A. “Taiwan Fiction: A Review of Recent Criticism.” Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association 13, 1 (1978): 72-80.

Ruan, Meihui. “Li and Modernism: The Development of a Poetry Journal.” In Paul Manfredi and Christopher Lupke, eds., Chinese Poetic Modernisms. Leiden: Brill, 2019, 153-77.

Sang, Tze-lang. “Lesbian Feminism in the Mass-Mediated Public Sphere of Taiwan.” In Mayfair Mei-hui Yang, ed., Spaces of Their Own: Women’s Public Sphere in Transnational China. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999, 132-61.

Schulz, Julia. “In Search of Taiwaneseness in Modern Taiwan Poetry.” Studia Orientalia Slovaca 11, 1 (2012).

Scruggs, Bert Mitchell. Collective Consciousness and Individual Identities in Colonial Taiwan Fiction. Ph. D. diss. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2003.

—–. “Censorship, Education, Technology, and the Colonial Taiwan Literary Field.” Journal of the International Student Center, Yokohama National University 10 (2003): 95-108.

—–. Translingual Narration: Colonial and Postcolonial Taiwanese Fiction and Film. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2015.

[AbstractTranslingual Narration is a study of colonial Taiwanese fiction, its translation from Japanese to Chinese, and films produced during and about the colonial era. It is a postcolonial intervention into a field largely dominated by studies of colonial Taiwanese writing as either a branch of Chinese fiction or part of a larger empire of Japanese language texts. Rather than read Taiwanese fiction as simply belonging to one of two discourses, Bert Scruggs argues for disengaging the nation from the former colony to better understand colonial Taiwan and its postcolonial critics. Following early chapters on the identity politics behind Chinese translations of Japanese texts, attempts to establish a vernacular Taiwanese literature, and critical space, Scruggs provides close readings of short fiction through the critical prisms of locative and cultural or ethnic identity to suggest that cultural identity is evidence of free will. Stories and novellas are also viewed through the critical prism of class-consciousness, including the writings of Yang Kui (1906–1985), who unlike most of his contemporaries wrote politically engaged literature. Scruggs completes his core examination of identity by reading short fiction through the prism of gender identity and posits a resemblance between gender politics in colonial Taiwan and pre-independence India. The work goes on to test the limits of nostalgia and solastalgia in fiction and film by looking at how both the colonial future and past are remembered before concluding with political uses of cinematic murder. Films considered in this chapter include colonial-era government propaganda documentaries and postcolonial representations of colonial cosmopolitanism and oppression. Finally, ideas borrowed from translation and memory studies as well as indigenization are suggested as possible avenues of discovery for continued interventions into the study of postcolonial and colonial Taiwanese fiction and culture.]

Shen, Na-huei. The Age of Sadness: A Study of Naturalism in Taiwanese Literature under Japanese Colonization. Ph. D. diss. Seattle: University of Washington, 2003.

Shih, Fang-long, Stuart Thompson, and Paul-Francois Tremlett, eds. Re-Writing Culture in Taiwan. London: Routledge, 2009.

Shih, Shu-mei and Ping-Hui Liao, eds. Comparatizing Taiwan. Routledge, 2014.

[Contents: Introduction: Why Taiwan? Why Comparatize?, Shu-mei Shih and Ping-hui Liao Part I: Taiwan in Comparison 1. Comparativism and Taiwan Studies: Analyzing Taiwan in/out of Context, or Taiwan as an East Asian New World Society, Frank Muyard 2. Tiger’s Leap into the Past: Comparative Temporalities and the Politics of Redemption, Chien-heng Wu 3. Comparison for Compassion: Exploring the Structures of Feeling in East Asia, Hong-luen Wang 4. Archipelagoes of Taiwan Literature: Comparative Methods and Island Writings in Taiwan, Yuting Huang 5. Paradoxes of Conservation and Comparison: Taiwan, Environmental Crises, and World Literatures, Karen Thornber 6. Weak Links, Literary Spaces, and Comparative Taiwan, Jing Tsu 7. Far-fetched Lands: The Caribbean, Taiwan, and Submarine Relations, Li-chun Hsiao Part II: Imperial Conjunctures and Contingencies 8. Is Feminism Translatable? Spivak, Taiwan, A-Wu, Shu-mei Shih 9. Voices of Empire in Dubliners and Taibenren, Margaret Hillenbrand 10. Body (Language) across the Sea: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Embodiment of Post/colonial Modernity, Faye Yuan Kleeman 11. Interlingual Discovery: Sato Haruo’s Travels in the Colony, Ping-hui Liao 12. Taiwan’s Postcolonial and Queer Discourse in the 1990s, Liang-ya Liou 13. Taiwan after the Colonial Century: Bringing China into the Foreground, Jieh-min Wu]

Shimazu, Naoka. “Colonial Encounters: Japanese Travel Writings on Colonial Taiwan.” In Yuko Kikuchi, ed. Refracted Modernity: Visual Culture and Identity in Colonial Taiwan. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 2007, 21-37.

Shu, James C. T. “Iconoclasm in Taiwan Literature: A Change in the ‘Family.'” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 2, 1 (Jan.1980): 73-85.

Skerratt, Brian. “Born Orphans of the Earth: Pastoral Utopia in Contemporary Taiwanese Poetry.” International Journal of Taiwan Studies 4, 1 (2021): 101-20.

[Abstract: In 2011, amid a string of controversies in the Taiwanese countryside surrounding industrial pollution, urban expansion, the unsustainable exploitation of natural resources, and the destruction of the natural and rural environments, poet and editor Hong Hong announced ‘the last pastoral poem’, suggesting that the representation of the countryside as bucolic landscape was an out-of-date and politically impotent trope. This paper argues, contrary to Hong Hong’s polemic, that depictions of pastoral utopia remain a vital and powerful alternative to the forces of urbanisation and industrialisation in Taiwan and the larger Sinophone world. The paper analyses poetry by contemporary poet Ling Yu against the background of the tradition of utopian pastoral writing represented by the book of Genesis, Virgil, Laozi, Tao Yuanming, and Gary Snyder. The paper argues for a poetics that symbolically mediates between nature and culture, and building and dwelling, by means of slow ‘cultivation’, in both the agricultural and aesthetic senses. The paper further draws on transnational Hong Kong poet Liu Wai Tong’s concept of ‘you-topia’ to suggest a means of reconciling Chinese tradition and contemporary ecocritical discourse.]

Smith, Craig. “Aboriginal Autonomy and Its Place in Taiwan’s National Trauma Narrative.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 24, 2 (Fall 2012): 209-39.

Song, Weijie. “1981, October 19: Food, Diaspora, and Nostalgia.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 753-58.

Sterk, Darryl. “The Hunter’s Gift in Ecorealist Indigenous Fiction from Taiwan.” Oriental Archive 81 (2013): 555-80.

Storm, Carsten and Mark Harrison, eds., The Margins of Becoming: Identity and Culture in Taiwan. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2007.

Sung, Mei-hwa. “Feminist Consciousness in Contemporary Fiction of Taiwan.” In S. Harrell and Chun-chieh Huang, eds. Cultural Exchange in Postwar Taiwan. Boulder: Westview, 1994, 275-93.

—–. “Writing Women’s Literary History: Gender Discourse and Women’s Literature in Taiwan.” In Kwok-kan Tam and Terry Siu-han Yip, eds., Gender, Discourse and the Self in Literature: Issues in Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. HK: The Chinese University Press, 2010, 171-92.

Taiwan Cultural Studies (Taiwan wenhua yanjiu)

Taiwan Literature Studies Database (Forum for the Study of World Literatures in Chinese, UC Santa Barbara)

Taiwan Literature Symposium (NY, Apri-May 1998)

Tang, Xiaobing. “On the Concept of Taiwan Literature.” Modern China 25, 4 (Oct. 1999): 379-422. Rpt. in David Wang and Carlos Rojas eds., Writing Taiwan: A New Literary History. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2006, 51-90.

Tarumi, Chie. “Listening to Voices from the Netherworld: Lu Heruo and the Kuso-Realism Debate.” Tr. Bert Scruggs. In Ping-hui Liao nad David Der-wei Wang, eds., Taiwan under Japanese Colonial Rule, 1895-1945. NY: Columbia University Press, 2006, 262-76.

Tay, William, ed. “Contemporary Chinese Fiction from Taiwan.” Special issue. Modern Chinese Literature 6, 1/2 (1992).

Thornber, Karen Laura. Empire of Texts in Motion: Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese Transculturations of Japanese Literature. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2009.

[Abstract: By the turn of the twentieth century, Japan’s military and economic successes made it the dominant power in East Asia, drawing hundreds of thousands of Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese students to the metropole and sending thousands of Japanese to other parts of East Asia. The constant movement of peoples, ideas, and texts in the Japanese empire created numerous literary contact nebulae, fluid spaces of diminished hierarchies where writers grapple with and transculturate one another’s creative output. Drawing extensively on vernacular sources in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, this book analyzes the most active of these contact nebulae: semicolonial Chinese, occupied Manchurian, and colonial Korean and Taiwanese transculturations of Japanese literature. It explores how colonial and semicolonial writers discussed, adapted, translated, and recast thousands of Japanese creative works, both affirming and challenging Japan’s cultural authority. Such efforts not only blurred distinctions among resistance, acquiescence, and collaboration but also shattered cultural and national barriers central to the discourse of empire. In this context, twentieth-century East Asian literatures can no longer be understood in isolation from one another, linked only by their encounters with the West, but instead must be seen in constant interaction throughout the Japanese empire and beyond.]

—–. “Paradoxes of Conservation and Comparison: Taiwan, Environmental Crises, and World Literature.” In Shu-mei Shih and Ping-hui Liao, eds., Comparatizing Taiwan. London: Routledge, 2015, 100-22.

Tozer, W. “Taiwan’s ‘Cultural Renaissance.'” The China Quarterly (July/Sept. 1970): 81-90.

Tsai, Chien-hsin. A Passage to China: Literature, Loyalism, and Colonial Taiwan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017.

[Abstract: This book, the first of its kind in English, examines the reinvention of loyalism in colonial Taiwan through the lens of literature. It analyzes the ways in which writers from colonial Taiwan—including Qiu Fengjia, Lian Heng, Wu Zhuoliu, and others—creatively and selectively employed loyalist ideals to cope with Japanese colonialism and its many institutional changes. In the process, these writers redefined their relationship with China and Chinese culture. Drawing attention to select authors’ lesser-known works, author Chien-hsin Tsai provides a new assessment of well-studied historical and literary materials and a nuanced overview of literary and cultural productions in colonial Taiwan. During and after Japanese colonialism, the islanders’ perception of loyalism, sense of belonging, and self-identity dramatically changed. Tsai argues that the changing tradition of loyalism unexpectedly complicates Taiwan’s tie to China, rather than unquestionably reinforces it, and presents a new line of inquiry for future studies of modern Chinese and Sinophone literature.]

Tseng, Shih-jung. “Identity and War: The Taiwanese National Consciousness under War Mobilization and Kominka Movement: A Study of ChenWancheng’s and Wu Xinrong’s Diaries (1937-1945).” In Carsten Storm and Mark Harrison, eds., The Margins of Becoming: Identity and Culture in Taiwan. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2007, 153-72.

—–. From Honto Jin to Bensheng Ren: The Origin and Development of Taiwanese National Consciousness. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2009.

[Abstract: This book attempts to use numerous volumes of mostly unpublished diaries for examining issues of Taiwanese identity. Using the diaries of two Taiwanese intellectuals, the author examines how the Taiwanese national consciousness emerged and was reconstructed under the Japanese and Chinese Nationalist rule between 1920 and 1955, suggesting that a multi-dimensional Taiwanese national consciousness was created in the 1920s. Nevertheless, between 1937 and 1945, it was reconstructed by the imperial war mobilization. It then underwent a further reconstruction during and after the regime change from Japan to China, leading to the emergence of the bensheng ren (native Taiwanese) consciousness. The emerging international Cold War environment enabled the creation of a de facto independent state based on Taiwan-size governance, which had an impact on shaping the bensheng ren identity.]

Tso, Sarah Yihsuan. “My Body, My Poetry”: Ai-lin Yen’s and Taiwanese Women Poets’ Poetics of the Body.” The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture 9, 1 (Dec. 2015): 29-59.

[Abstract: With the tenet of “my body, my poetry,” this paper argues that poetry written by women claims the right to articulate the female body and champions the validity of their poems about the female body. Rather than being denominated in literary history as an alternative school of carnality, women’s poetry about the body should be judged by its aesthetic value. A pioneer among Taiwanese women poets on the subject of the body, Ai-lin Yen in Bone, Skin, and Flesh (1997) advances a personal feminism which is frank and honest about female desire as well as the female body, and about the exploitation of the female body. Yen’s poems expand on the motility and stases of the drives and abjection, and sketch what Elaine Showalter calls a “double-voiced discourse” in dialectical relationships with both male and female traditions.]

Tsu, Jing. “Weak Links, Literary Spaces, and Comparative Taiwan.” In Shu-mei Shih and Ping-hui Liao, eds., Comparatizing Taiwan. London: Routledge, 2015, 123-44.

Tu, Kuo-ch’ing. “The Study of Taiwan Literature: An International Perspective.” Taiwan Literature English Translation Series 2 (Dec. 1997): xiii-.

—–. “Urban Literature and the Fin-de-siecle in Taiwan.” Taiwan Literature English Translation Series 6 (Dec. 1999): xiii-.

—–. “Foreword: Lai Ho, Wu Cho-liu, and Taiwan Literature.” Taiwan Literature English Translation Series 15 (2004): xix-xxx.

—–. “Taiwan Literature and Childhood.” Taiwan Literature: English Translation Series 22 (Jan. 2008): vii-xii.

Tuan, Iris Hsin-chun. Alternative Theater in Taiwan: Feminist and Intercultural Approaches. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2007.

[Abstract: Taiwan’s historical and contemporary status as a nexus of Asian and Western cultural influences provides a rich canvas of research for the author who is uniquely trained in both Western critical and Taiwanese theatrical practices. This highly original book furnishes a creative interpretation of alternative, contemporary Taiwanese Theater by applying Feminism, Interculturalism and other western theories to three intercultural performances of four avant-garde female directors from 1993-2004. Although several important playwrights and directors have staged vital gender critiques of national and international practices, almost no critic has remarked upon them. The book’s intersection of a gender critique, and, in part, a postcolonial one, with Taiwanese stage practices is, therefore, a unique and significant contribution.]

Tung, Constantine. “Current Literary Scene in Taiwan: An Observation.” Asian Thought and Society 3 (1978): 338-45.

van Fliet Hang, Krista. “The Road to Industrialization: Chinese Realism in Taiwan and the People’s Republic.” In Marc L. Moskowitz, ed., Popular Culture in Taiwan: Charismatic Modernity. NY: Routledge, 2010, 52-64.

Wang, David. “Radical Laughter in Lao She and His Taiwan Successors.” In Howard Goldblatt, ed., Worlds Apart: Recent Chinese Writing and its Audiences. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1990, 44-63.

—–. “Translating Taiwan: A Study of Four English Anthologies of Taiwan Fiction.” In Eugene Eoyang, ed., Translating Chinese Literature. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995. 262-72.

—– and Carlos Rojas, eds. Writing Taiwan: A New Literary History. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2006. [MCLC Resource Center Publications review by Pei-Yin Lin]

Wang, Jing. “Taiwan Hsiang-t’u Literature: Perspectives in the Evolution of a Literary Movement.” In J. Faurot, ed. Chinese Fiction from Taiwan: Critical Perspectives. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1980.

—–. “The Rise of Children’s Poetry in Contemporary Taiwan.” Modern Chinese Literature 3, 1/2 (1987): 57-70.

Wang, Tuo. “Native Literature as a Stimulus for Social Change: From a Writing Career to Political Activism.” Tr. Juliettte Gregory. In Helmut Martin Modern Chinese Writers: Self-portrayals. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1992, 224-30.

Weinstein, John B. “Multilingual Theater in Contemporary Taiwan.” Asian Theatre Journal 17, 2 (2000): 269-83. [Project Muse link]

Wu, Chia-rong. Supernatural Sinophone Taiwan and Beyond. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2016. [MCLC Resource Center review by Alvin K. Wong]

[Abstract: The first scholarly monograph focusing on the literary and cultural geography of Taiwan through a Sinophone lens . . . While reexamining the cultural and political complexities of Sinophone Taiwan, this book also recognizes the narrative of the strange as a widely adopted artistic form in highlighting Sinophone practices and experiences separated from the China-centric ideology. The study argues that the narratives of the strange in Sinophone Taiwan cross the boundaries between the living and the dead as well as the past and the present, in response to a pastiche of phantasm, Chinese diaspora, gender discourse, and transnational politics.]

—–. “On Taiwan Literature Studies and Self-reflection.” Taiwan Lit 1, 2 (Fall 2020).

Xiong, Ying. Representing Empire: Japanese Colonial Literature in Taiwan and Manchuria. Leiden: Brill, 2014. [MCLC Resource Center review by Norman Smith]

[Abstract: In Representing Empire Ying Xiong examines Japanese-language colonial literature written by Japanese expatriate writers in Taiwan and Manchuria. Drawing on a wide range of Japanese and Chinese sources, Representing Empire reveals not only a nuanced picture of Japanese literary terrain but also the interplay between imperialism, nationalism, and Pan-Asianism in the colonies. While the existing literature on Japanese nationalism has largely remained within the confines of national history, by using colonial literature as an example, Ying Xiong demonstrates that transnational forces shaped Japanese nationalism in the twentieth century. With its multidisciplinary and comparative approach, Representing Empire adds to a growing body of literature that challenges traditional interpretations of Japanese nationalism and national literary canon.]

Yang, Jane Parish. “The Evolution of the Taiwanese New Literature Movement from 1920-1940.” Fu Jen Studies: Literature and Linguistics 15 (1982): 1-18.

Yang, Xiaobin. “Telling (Hi)story: Illusory Truth or True Illusion.” Tamkang Review 21, 2 (1990): 127-47.

Ye, Shitao. A History of Taiwan Literature. Tr./ed. Christopher Lupke. Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2020. [MCLC Resource Center review by Po-hsi Chen]

Yee, Angelina C. “Constructing a Native Consciousness: Taiwan Literature in the Twentieth Century.” The China Quarterly 165 (March 2001): 83-101. Rpt. in Richard Louis Edmonds and Steven M. Goldstein, eds., Taiwan in the Twentieth Century: A Retrospective View. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, 83-101.

Yeh, Michelle. “Modern Poetry in Taiwan: Continuities and Innovations.” In S. Harrell and Chun-chieh Huang, eds. Cultural Exchange in Postwar Taiwan. Boulder: Westview, 1994, 227-45.

—–. “From Surrealism to Nature Poetics: A Study of Prose Poetry from Taiwan.” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 3, 2 (Jan. 2000): 119-56.

—–. “Modern Poetry of Taiwan.” In Joshua Mostow, ed, and Kirk A. Denton, China section, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literature. NY: Columbia UP, 2003, 561-69. Rpt. in Kirk A. Denton, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia University Press, 2016, 3327-35.

—–. “‘On Our Destitute Dinner Table’: Modern Poetry Quarterly in the 1950s.” In David Wang and Carlos Rojas eds., Writing Taiwan: A New Literary History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006, 113-39.

—–. “The Russian Imaginary and Modern Chinese Poetry in Taiwan.” Prism 20, 1 (2023): 117-38.

[Abstract: Russia in Taiwanese literature is a topic that has received little scholarly attention. Although Russian literature in translation has been available in Taiwan since the Japanese Occupation period, the selections and receptions contrast sharply from those in mainland China due to geopolitical reasons. This article begins with an overview of the introduction of Russian literature into Taiwan in the twentieth century. Then it focuses on the Russian imaginary in modern Chinese poetry in Taiwan as represented by two major poets: Ya Xian and Yang Mu. Rather than an influence study, this article is an exploration of the multiple ways in which Russia functions semantically, structurally, and sonically in the poems.]

Yeh Shih-t’ao. “A Long Range View of Taiwan Fiction.” Tr. Linda G. Wang. Taiwan Literature: English Translation Series 4 (1999): 99-102.

—–. “The Multi-Ethnic Issue of Taiwan Literature.” Tr. Wan-shu Lu. Taiwan Literature: English Translation Series, No. 3 (1998): 3-12.

—–. An Outline History of Taiwan Literature. Taiwan Writers Translation Series. Santa Barbara: Center for Chinese Studies, University of California, 2007.

—–. “Protest Literature during the Japanese Occupation.” Taiwan Literature, English Translation Series 20 (2007): 145-59.

—–. “Memories of the Literary Circles during the Japanese Occupation.” Tr. John Balcom. Taiwan Literature, English Translation Series 20 (2007): 113-24.

Yen, Yuan-shu. “The Japanese Experience in Taiwan Fiction.” Tamkang Review 4, 2 (Oct. 1973): 167-88.

—–. “Social Realism in Recent Chinese Fiction from Taiwan.” Thirty Years of Turmoil in Asian Literature. Taipei: International PEN, 1976, 197-231.

Yeung, Jessica Siu-yin. “Hong Kong Literature and the Taiwanese Encounter: Literary Magazines, Popular Literature and Shih Shu-Ching’s Hong Kong Stories.” Cultural History 12, 2 (2023): 224-250.

[Abstract: This article examines the ways literary adaptations between Hong Kong and Taiwanese writers shape literary cultures in both places during the Cold War period. The 1950s and 1960s were the time when Hong Kong and Taiwan literary cultures were starting to thrive. An influx of literati into both places collaborated with each other and the locals to experiment with literary forms in literary magazines. The 1950s and 1960s were also the time when Hong Kong and Taiwan cinema experienced the first waves of adapting literary works into film in the postwar period. After the literary magazine culture dwindled in the 1970s, a new generation of writers in both places emerged. In Hong Kong, these new writers may not be native, but they take Hong Kong as their main subject in their writings. The Taiwanese writer Shih Shu-ching is one of them. In studying Hong Kong-Taiwan literary adaptation histories, one may easily overlook the adaptation from fiction to screenplay, as in Shih and the Taiwanese playwright Wang Chi-mei’s case. By understanding the literary relationship between Hong Kong and Taiwan in the Cold War, together with their adaptation histories, we can acquire a clearer sense of how these literary cultures developed.]

Yip, June. Envisioning Taiwan: Fiction, Cinema and the Nation in the Cultural Imaginary. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2004.

Yip, Wai-lim, ed. Chinese Arts and Literature: A Survey of Recent Trends. Occasional Papers/Reprint Series in Contemporary Asian Studies. Baltimore, 1977. [articles on Chen Ruoxi and on poetry]

Yu Guangzhong (Yu Kwang-chung). “Chinese Poetry in Taiwan.” The Chinese Pen (Autumn 1972): 42-65

Yue, Hsin-I Sydney. Identity Politics and Popular Culture in Taiwan: A Sajiao Generation. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017.


Hong Kong

Abbas, M. A. “The Last Emporium: Verse and Cultural Space.” In Leung Ping-Kwan, ed., City at the End of Time. Hong Kong: Twilight Books, 1992, 3-19.

—–. Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Abbas, Ackbar and Wu Hung, eds. “Hong Kong 1997: The Place and the Formula.” Special issue of Public Culture 9, 3 (1997).

Au, C. T. “Out of the Ashes: On Hong Kong Literary Studies, 2010-2020.” Archiv orientální 89, 2 (2021): 429-42. 

Birus, Hendrik. “Introduction to and Discussion Summary of William Tay’s Colonialism, Cold War Era, and Marginal Space: The Existential Conditions of Four Decades of Hong Kong Literature.” Surfaces 5 (1995).

Chan, Mimi. “Women in Hong Kong Fiction Written in English: The Mixed Liason.” Renditions. 29/30 (Spring/Autumn, 1988): 257-74.

Chan, Sin-wai, ed. Translation in Hong Kong: Past, Present and Future. Hong Kong: Chinese University of HK Press, 2000.

Chao, Di-kai and Riccardo Moratto. “Seeing Others: Ethics of Ghost Narrative in Sinophone Hong Kong Literature.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 36, 1 (2024): 52-83.

[Abstract: Inspired by the Sinophone discourse on translocality, this paper analyzes Mak Shu Kin’s novella “Slow and Long Night” (Manman changye, 2019), Tse Hiu-Hung’s short story “The Umbrellaless Ghost” (Wu zhe gui, 2015), and Tse’s novella “The City of Dissipating Streams” (Shi shui liu cheng, 2020). We analyze how ghosts in Mak’s text become symbolic of the characters trying to survive in a translocal context, while in Tse’s work, they express the significance of a community through différance and magical realism. We argue that these texts represent a new generation of Hong Kong writers who, through Hong Kong’s Sinophone “situatedness,” resort to ghost narratives to respond to an ethical commitment to the Other and a sense of community, thus enabling Hong Kong literature studies to move beyond the framework of “déjà disparu” or “anti-incorporation.”]

Cheung, Esther M. K. “The Hi/stories of Hong Kong.” Cultural Studies 15, 3/4 (July 2001): 564-90.

[Abstract: This paper examines the formation of modernity in three colonialist epics of Hong Kong and the recent historical and fictional works that aim to rewrite the history of the’local’. Adopting a challenge-response structure, the paper argues that the colonialist epics construct a monolithic discourse of modernity-as-progress via the amnesia of conflicts, tensions, and processes of domination and negotiation in the rural and everyday space of colonial Hong Kong. It is stressed that to piece together the above anomalies is not an attempt to restore a pre-given ‘native’ to but rather an endeavour to examine how the ‘local’ as divergent historical agents shaped and has been shaped by the political, social, and economic environment of Hong Kong and the larger world outside. This can be called a model of dialectics composed of an internal dialectic and a dialectic of articulation. In this regard, with the benefit of the rapprochement of history and anthropology and a non-linear view of history, this paper is a historical bricolage of the anomalous history of Hong Kong, aiming to destabilize the Hong Kong historical grand narrative. Through rethinking the impact of the colonial experience, this paper hopes to liberate alterity and diversity in historical interpretations and imaginations.

—–. “Voices of Negotiation in Late Twentieth-Century Hong Kong Literature.” In Joshua Mostow, ed, and Kirk A. Denton, China section, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literatures. NY: Columbia UP, 2003, 604-609.

—–. “New Ends in a City of Transition.” In Cheung, ed., City at the End of Time: Poems by Leung Ping-kwan. Trans. Gordon Osing. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013, 1-19.

—–. “Hong Kong Voices: Literature from the Late Twentieth Century to the New Millennium.” Kirk A. Denton, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia University Press, 2016, 407-13.

Cheung, Kai-chong. “Fictional Portrayals of the Colonial Cultures of Hong Kong.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 24, 4 (1997): 829-34.

Chow, Rey. “Between Colonizers: Hong Kong’s Postcolonial Self-Writing in the 1990s.” Diaspora 2, 2 (Fall 1992).

—–. “King Kong in Hong Kong: Watching the ‘Handover’ from the USA.” Social Text 55 (Summer 1998): 93-108.

Chu, Yiu-Wai. Lost in Transition Hong Kong Culture in the Age of China. Albany: SUNY Press, 2013. [MCLC Resource Center review by David Desser]

[Abstract: In this timely and insightful book, Yiu-Wai Chu takes stock of Hong Kong¡¦s culture since its transition to a Special Administrative Region of the People¡¦s Republic of China in 1997. Hong Kong had long functioned as the capitalist and democratic stepping stone to China for much of the world. Its highly original popular culture was well known in Chinese communities, and its renowned film industry enjoyed worldwide audiences and far-reaching artistic influence. Chu argues that Hong Kong¡¦s culture was ¡§lost in transition¡¨ when it tried to affirm its international visibility and retain the status quo after 1997. In an era when China welcomed outsiders and became the world¡¦s most rapidly developing economy, Hong Kong¡¦s special position as a capitalist outpost was no longer a privilege. By drawing on various cultural discourses, such as film, popular music, and politics of everyday life, Chu provides an informative and critical analysis of the impact of China¡¦s ascendency on the notion of ¡§One Country, Two Cultures.¡¨ Hong Kong can no longer function as a bridge between China and the world, writes Chu, and must now define itself from global, local, and national perspectives.]

Chu, Yiu-Wai. Hong Kong Pop Culture in the 1980s: A Decade of Splendour. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023.

[Abstract: This book deals with the 1980s – the “golden decade” of Hong Kong pop culture – in which a cosmopolitan lifestyle of pop and chic emerged in the city. Bookended by two major historical incidents, the 1980s will probably enter the annals of Hong Kong history as the decade that defined its future after reversion to Mainland China. Having witnessed and experienced the rise of Hong Kong pop culture to unprecedented heights in this decade, the author enhances its context through a story about his own personal belongings. Examining popular genres including television, film, music, fashion, disco and city magazine, this book teases out the distinctive aspects of Hong Kong pop culture that defined (his) Hong Kong. As Hong Kong has been undergoing drastic changes in recent years, it is necessary to point toward new imaginaries by re-examining its development. Toward this end, this book will shed light on an important research area of Hong Kong Studies as an academic discipline.]

Damm, Jens. Ku’er vs. tongzhi – Diskurse der Homosexualität. Über das Entstehen sexueller Identitäten im glokalisierten Taiwan und im postkolonialen Hongkong (Discourses on homosexual identities in Taiwan and Hong Kong). Bochum: Cathay Skripten, Taiwan Studies Series, no. 16, 2000.

[Abstract: During the nineties, two different discourses on homosexual identity have developed in Hong Kong and in Taiwan: a tongzhi-discourse in Hong Kong, which attributes the negative attitude toward homosexuality in modern Chinese societies to the influence of (post)colonialism and appeals for a more tolerant attitude by making frequent and pointed reference to the Chinese tradition of male homosexual relationships. The Taiwanese ku’er (queer) discourse, which regards Taiwanese society as being firmly embedded in a globalized world, may therefore be seen as resulting from a blend of glocalized influences and a more tolerant attitude is only possible in a pluralistic society where the flow of gender and desire is recognized. In the paper, two recently published works are presented as examples for the two discourses: Post-Colonial ‘Tongzhi’, written by the Hong Kong sociologist Zhou Huashan and Queer Archipelago: A Reader of the Queer Discourses in Taiwan compiled by the Taiwanese author of belles-lettres and ku’er-theoretician Ji Dawei. It is also shown that the differences in the discourses may be traced back to the drifting apart of the political and social scenarios in Taiwan and Hong Kong.]

Evans, Grant and Maria Tam. Hong Kong: The Anthropology of a Chinese Metropolis. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998.

Feeley, Jennifer. “Reimagined Cities: Fabulist Tales from Hong Kong.” Words without Borders (June 2018).

Ho, Elaine Yee Lin. “Women in Exile: A Study of Hong Kong Fiction.” In Elizabeth Sinn, ed. Culture and Society in Hong Kong. HK: Centre of Asian Studies, University of Hong Kong, 1995, 133-59.

——. “Connecting Cultures: Hong Kong Literature in English, the 1950s.” New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 5, 2 (Dec. 2003): 5-25.

Ho, Louis. “Apartheid Discourse in Contested Space: Aspects of Hong Kong Culture.” Comparative Literature and Culture 3 (Sept. 1998): 1-10.

Hooper, Brian. Voices in the Heart: Postcolonialism and Identity in Hong Kong Literature. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2003.

The House of Hong Kong Literature [香港文學館].

Huen, Anthony and Felix Chow. “Cosmopolitan Hybridity, Cultural Memory and Curation in Hong Kong Poetry.” Writing Chinese: A Journal of Contemporary Sinophone Literature 2, 1 (2023).

Ingham, Michael. Hong Kong: A Cultural and Literary History. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2007.

Klein, Lucas. “One Part in Concert, and One Part Repellence: Liu Waitong, Cao Shuying, and the Question of Hong Kong and Mainland Chinese Sinophones.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 30, 2  (Fall 2018): 141-172

Lam, Agnes. “Poetry in Hong Kong: The 1990s.” World Literature Today 73, 1 (1999): 53-62.

Lee, Gregory. “Hong Kong Writing Today: Cantonese, Polyglossia and the Postcolonial Condition.” Writing Chinese: A Journal of Contemporary Sinophone Literature 2, 1 (2023).

Lee, Quentin. “Delineating Asian (Hong Kong) Intellectuals: Speculations on Intellectual Problematics and Post/Coloniality.” Third Text 26 (Spring 1994): 11-23.

Leung, Ping-Kwan. 1995. “Hong Kong Story: Why Is It So Hard to Tell It?” Hong Kong Culture. Hong Kong: Hong Kong Arts Center, 4-12.

Leung, Shuk Man. “Imagining a National/Local Identity in the Colony: The Cultural Revolution Discourse in Hong Kong Youth and Student Journals, 1966–1977.” Cultural Studies 34, 2 (2020): 317-340.

Lilley, Rozanna. Staging Hong Kong: Gender and Performance in Transition. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 1998.

Lingenfelter, Andrea. “Evocative Accounts of Soon-to-Vanish Sites: Recent – and Not So recent -Hong Kong Poetry and Prose.” Los Angeles Review of Books (Dec. 23, 2021).

Liu, Denghan 刘灯翰, ed. Xianggang wenxue shi 香港文学史 (History of Hong Kong literature). Beijing: Renmin wenxue, 1997.

Lo, Kwai-Cheung. “Look Who’s Talking: The Politics of Orality in Transitional Hong Kong Mass Culture.” Boundary 2. Special Issue ed. Rey Chow. 25, 2 (Fall 1998): 47-76.

—–. “Men Aren’t Men: Feminization of the Masculine Subject in the Works of Some Hong Kong Male Writers.” In Kwok-kan Tam and Terry Siu-han Yip, eds., Gender, Discourse and the Self in Literature: Issues in Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. HK: The Chinese University Press, 2010, 225-44.

McDougall, Bonnie. “1997: Hong Kong’s Literary Retrocession in Three Fantastical Novels.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 856-61.

McFarlane, Scot. “Transporting the Emporium: Hong Kong Art and Writing Through the Ends of Time.” West Coast Line 21 (1997): 39-40.

Møller-Olsen, Astrid. Sensing the Sinophone: Urban Memoryscapes in Contemporary Fiction. Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2021.

[Abstract: Through an original framework of literary sensory studies, this monograph provides a comparative analysis of how six contemporary works of Sinophone fiction reimagine the links between the self and the city, the past and the present, as well as the physical and the imaginary. It explores the connection between elusive memories and material cityscapes through the matrix of the senses. Joining recent efforts to imagine world literature beyond the international, Sensing the Sinophone engages in a triangular comparison of fiction from Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Taipei—three Sinophone cities, each with its own strong urban identity thatc comes with unique cultural and linguistic hybridities.]

Ng, Janet. Paradigm City: Space, Culture, and Capitalism in Hong Kong. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009.

[Abstract: Hong Kong is often cast in the role of the paradigmatic “global city,” epitomizing postmodernism and globalization, and representing a vision of a cosmopolitan global and capitalist future. In Paradigm City, Janet Ng takes us past the obsession with 1997—the year of Hong Kong’s return to China—to focus on the complex uses and meanings of urban space in Hong Kong in the period following that transfer. She demonstrates how the design and ordering of the city’s space and the practices it supports inculcates a particular civic aesthetic among Hong Kong’s population that corresponds to capitalist as well as nationalist ideologies. Ng’s insightful connections between contemporary film, literature, music and other media and the actual spaces of the city—such as parks, shopping malls, and domestic spaces—provide a rich and nuanced picture of Hong Kong today.]

Pan, Lu, ed. The 70’s Biweekly: Social Activism and Alternative Cultural Production in 1970s Hong Kong. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2023.

[Abstract: Taking The 70’s Biweekly—an independent youth publication in the 1970s’ Hong Kong—as the main thread, this edited volume investigates an unexplored trajectory of Hong Kong’s cultural and art production in the 1970s that represents the making of a dissent space by independent press and activist groups in the city. The 70’s Biweekly stands out from many other independent magazines with its unique blending of radical political theories, social activism, avant-garde art, and local art and literature creations. By taking the magazine as a nodal point of social and cultural activism from and around which actions, debates, community, and artistic practices are formed and generated, this book fills gaps in studies on how young Hong Kong cultural producers carved out an alternative creative and political space to speak against established authorities. Split into three parts, this book provides readers with a panoramic view of the political and cultural activisms in Hong Kong during the 1970s, writings on art and film, and crucially, interviews with former founders and contributors that reflect on how their participation led them to engage ideologically with their activism and community that extended far beyond the temporal and physical bounds of the magazine.]

Pan Yatun 潘亞暾 and Wang Yisheng 汪義生. Xianggang wenxue gaiguan香港文學槪觀 (An overview of Hong Kong literature). Xiamen: Lujiang, 1993.

Shen, Shuang. “Popular Literature in the Inter-imperial Space of Hong Kong and Singapore/Malaya.” Prism 19, 2 (2022): 301-218.

[Abstract: This article addresses the neglect toward popular literary networks with Hong Kong in the Cold War period by influential Mahua scholars. Aiming to make way for a more robust discourse of cultural politics in tandem with a regional conceptualization of Sinophone cultural production, the article proposes to understand popular forms such as romance fiction as arising from and coconstituting a regional Sinosphere that can only be understood, following Laura Doyle’s recent study, as inter-imperial. Offering a reading of the Hong Kong writer Liu Yichang’s romantic fiction and immigrant stories, I show how the stories signify a geopolitical reckoning with the Cold War patterning of the world. This perspective offers more ways for us to evaluate how the regional literary field intersected with the Cold War beyond the singular defense of its “literariness.”]

Snow, Donald B. Written Cantonese and the Culture of Hong Kong: The Growth of Dialect Literature. Ph.D. diss. Bloomington: Indiana University, 1991.

Song, Chris. “The Trope of Life in Hong Kong Poetry: Realism, Survival, and Shenghuohua.” Writing Chinese: A Journal of Contemporary Sinophone Literature 2, 1 (2023).

Tam, Enoch Yee Lok. “Recognition, Reinhabitation, and Recreation: Engaging Nature in Hong Kong Literature.” In Kwai-Cheung Lo and Jessica Yeung, eds., Chinese Shock of the Anthropocene: Image, Music and Text in the Age of Climate Change. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, 57-79.

[Abstract: In a fast changing place like Hong Kong whose landscape is always under large-scale urban development and infrastructure projects, the notion of nature would always be a site for literary interrogation. The booming days of social construction and economic transformation, that is, the 1970s, was the time when people in Hong Kong showed their identification with the city while at the same time were alienated from nature. Since then, Hong Kong writers have tried to engage nature in their literary imagination of the relationship between humans and landscape. I put forward in this chapter the three modes of engaging nature in Hong Kong literature, that is, recognition, reinhabitation, and recreation. By recognition I mean to re-cognise what nature is—to acquire new knowledge about nature; by reinhabitation I mean a person adjusting their relationship towards nature based on the new knowledge they acquire during their engagement with nature; by recreation I point to the spaces in which people can recreate and re-create themselves, to have enjoyment in nature while reorienting their relationship with society. The discussion focuses on Hong Kong writers like Wu Xubin, Xi Xim, and Dung Kai-cheung to see how they, in the face of large-scale urbanisation of their hometowns, develop a new understanding of their relationship with nature and reshape their awareness of the interdependency between humans and nature.]

Tam, Kwok-kan. The Englishized Subject: Postcolonial Writings in Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia. Singapore: Springer, 2019.

—–. [譚國根]. 2000. “‘Fucheng’ shenfen yishi: Gucangwu shi de fei zhimin yixiang yu Xianggang bentu yishi”「浮城」身份意識——古蒼梧詩的非殖民意象與香港本土意識 (The identity of “the floating city”: non-colonial imagery and Hong Kong local consciousness). In Tam, Zhuti jiangou zhengzhi yu xiandai Zhongguo wenxue [[主體建構政治與現代中國文學 (The politics of subjectivity construction and modern Chinese literature). Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 2020, 199-218.

Tay, William. “Colonialism, the Cold War Era, and Marginal Space: The Existential Conditions of Four Decades of Hong Kong Literature.” Surfaces 5 (1995). Aslo in Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang and Michelle Yeh, eds., Contemporary Chinese Literature: Crossing the Boundaries. Special issue of Literature East and West. Austin, TX: Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, 1995, 141-47.

—–. “Colonialism, The Cold War Era, and Marginal Space: The Existential Condition of Five Decades of Hong Kong Literature.” In Pang-yuan Chi and David Wang, eds., Chinese Literature in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century: A Critical Survey. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2000, 31-38.

Taylor, Jeremy E. “Nation, Topography, and Historiography: Writing Topographical Histories in Hong Hong.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 15,2 (Fall 2003): 45-75.

Tong, Christopher. “Hong Kong Poets and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Literary Genre.” Writing Chinese: A Journal of Contemporary Sinophone Literature 2, 1 (2023).

Turner, Matthew. Hong Kong Sixties: Designing Identity. HK: Hong Kong Arts Centre, 1995.

Veg, Sebastian. “Putting Hong Kong’s New Cultural Activism on the Literary Map: Review Essay.” MCLC Resource Center Publication (May 2013).

—–. “Creating a Textual Public Space: Slogans and Texts from Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement.” Journal of Asian Studies 75, 3 (2016): 673-702.

[Abstract: HK’s Umbrella Movement (September–December 2014) represented a watershed in HK’s political culture and self-understanding. Based on over 1,000 slogans and other textual and visual material documented during the movement, this study provides an overview of claims, which are oriented towards an assertion of agency, articulated at different levels: in a universalistic mode (“democracy”), in relation with a political community (HK autonomy and decolonization), and through concrete policy aims. At the same time, slogans mobilize diverse cultural and historical repertoires that attest the hybrid quality of HK identity and underscore the diversity of sources of political legitimacy. Finally, it will be argued that by establishing a system of contending discourses within the occupied public spaces, the movement strived to act out a type of discursive democracy. Despite the challenges that this discursive space encountered in interacting with the authorities and the public at large, it represented an unfinished attempt to build a new civic culture among Hong Kong’s younger generation.]

Wang, Xiaoying. “Hong Kong, China, and the Question of Postcoloniality.” In Xudong Zhang and Arif Dirlik, eds., Postmodernism and China. Durham: Duke UP, 2000, 89-122.

Wong, Alvin K. “Queer Sinophone Literature in Hong Kong: The Politics of Worldliness.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed., A World History of Chinese Literature. New York: Routledge, 2023, 133-44.

Wong, Dorothy. “Local, Place and Meaning: A Cultural Reading of the Hong Kong Stories.” Asian and African Studies [Brataslava] 9, 2 (2000): 168-86.

Wong, Jennifer. “Hong Kong Literature at Its Crossroads.” Writing Chinese: A Journal of Contemporary Sinophone Literature 2, 1 (2023).

Wong, Wai-leung. Hong Kong Literature in the Context of Modern Chinese Literature. Hong Kong: Centre for Hong Kong Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1987.

Wu, Gabriel. “The Post-1997 Northbound Movement of Hong Kong Writers.” International Communication of Chinese Culture 3, 3 (2016): 479-94.

[Abstract: The return of Hong Kong to the PRC in 1997 has reworked the contours of HK’s literary landscape, from which more and more writers are moving northward, some physically but more in terms of publishing works on the mainland. The access to a gigantic readership in the north is obviously the major pull factor for such movement. It invites writers and the publishers to employ different strategies to attain success, involving not simply the switch from the traditional form of Chinese to the simplified one but something much more complicated. On the one hand, the publishing houses require writers to reduce their use of local expressions and to adhere to standardized Chinese, not to mention the editorial censorship of politically incorrect subject matter and expressions. On the other hand, mainland readers seem to maintain keen interest in seeking what they consider to be exotic, either content- or language-wise, in HK writing. This has led to the emergence of different types of HK writers—compromising and uncompromising clusters—in terms of their responses to the imposed publication restrictions. More importantly, the so-called ‘HK identity’ remains a subject of negotiation and constant reformation.]

Xie Changqing 謝常青. Xianggang xin wenxue jianshi 香港新文學簡史 (A concise history of Hong Kong new literature). Guangzhou: jinan daxue, 1990.

Ye Si 也斯. Xianggang wenhua 香港文化 (Hong Kong culture). HK: Hong Kong Arts Centre, 1995.

Yee, Winnie L. M. “Reinventing ‘Nature’: A Study of Ecotopian and Cultural Imaginaries in Hong Kong Literature.” Prism 17, 2 (2020).

Yeung, Jessica Siu-yin. “Hong Kong Literature and the Taiwanese Encounter: Literary Magazines, Popular Literature and Shih Shu-Ching’s Hong Kong Stories.” Cultural History 12, 2 (2023): 224-250.

[Abstract: This article examines the ways literary adaptations between Hong Kong and Taiwanese writers shape literary cultures in both places during the Cold War period. The 1950s and 1960s were the time when Hong Kong and Taiwan literary cultures were starting to thrive. An influx of literati into both places collaborated with each other and the locals to experiment with literary forms in literary magazines. The 1950s and 1960s were also the time when Hong Kong and Taiwan cinema experienced the first waves of adapting literary works into film in the postwar period. After the literary magazine culture dwindled in the 1970s, a new generation of writers in both places emerged. In Hong Kong, these new writers may not be native, but they take Hong Kong as their main subject in their writings. The Taiwanese writer Shih Shu-ching is one of them. In studying Hong Kong-Taiwan literary adaptation histories, one may easily overlook the adaptation from fiction to screenplay, as in Shih and the Taiwanese playwright Wang Chi-mei’s case. By understanding the literary relationship between Hong Kong and Taiwan in the Cold War, together with their adaptation histories, we can acquire a clearer sense of how these literary cultures developed.]

Yeung, Wayne C. F. “Poetics of the People: The Politics of Debating Local Identity in Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement and Its Literature (2014–16).” Modern Asian Studies 55, 6 (Nov. 2021): 1848-1882.

[Abstract: This article scrutinizes the negotiations with, and discursive refashioning of, Hong Kong identity during and after the Umbrella Movement (2014–16). I argue that these discursive experimentations borne out of the Umbrella Movement bring to light Hong Kong’s uniquely cultural formulations of democratic self-determination that exceed the traditional analytic framework of Hong Kong cultural studies. The article analyses literary works as a hitherto neglected facet of the ‘Umbrella culture’ that, as a whole, acts as a discursive laboratory for multiple reflexive theorizations of Hong Kong identity and democratic subjectivity to be devised and debated. Cases studied here include the protesters’ on-site cultural expressions and two major Hong Kong literary authors: Dung Kai-cheung and Wong Bik-wan. This article examines social-movements artworks and literary works in terms of their performative and ethnographic dimensions, arguing that they are important intellectual and cultural-political processes to produce new knowledge about collective identity. This article first demonstrates how the Umbrella artworks repurpose the performative and the ethnographic strategies in Saisai’s canonical novel, My City (1975), often cited as the ur-text of Hong Kong identity, to proclaim themselves as ‘we the Hong Kong people’. After reading Dung’s and Wong’s Umbrella-related works, I then show in this article that the performative and the ethnographic can open up spaces to reconfigure collective identity beyond its existent discourses. Putting theories of performativity into dialogue with critical ethnography, I consider the politics of negotiating and debating cultural identity in literature and protest arts as integral to postcolonial democratic action.]

Yip, Wai-lim. “1955: Hong Kong Modernism and I.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 597-601.

Zha, Jianying. “Citizen Chan: Is Hong Kong Poised to Take Over Mainland China?” Transition 65 (1995): 69-94.

Zhang Meijun [Esther Cheung] and Zhu Yaowei, eds. Xianggang wenxue@wenhua yanjiu (Hong Kong literature as/and cultural studies). HK: Oxford UP, 2002.


Diaspora/Exile/Transnational/Sinophone/World Literature

Ang, Ien. On Not Speaking Chinese: Living between Asia and the West. London / New York: Routledge, 2001.

—–. “The Inherent Contradiction of Sinoglossia.” In Andrea Bachner, Howard Chiang, and Yu-lin Lee, eds., Sinoglossia. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2023, 212-19.

Bachner, Andrea. Beyond Sinology: Chinese Writing and the Scripts of Culture. NY: Columbia University Press, 2014. [MCLC Resource Center review by Edward McDonald]

[Abstract: New communication and information technologies provide distinct challenges and possibilities for the Chinese script, which, unlike alphabetic or other phonetic scripts, relies on multiple signifying principles. In recent decades, this multiplicity has generated a rich corpus of reflection and experimentation in literature, film, visual and performance art, and design and architecture, within both China and different parts of the West. Approaching this history from a variety of alternative theoretical perspectives, Beyond Sinology reflects on the Chinese script to pinpoint the multiple connections between languages, scripts, and medial expressions and cultural and national identities. Through a complex study of intercultural representations, exchanges, and tensions, the text focuses on the concrete “scripting” of identity and alterity, advancing a new understanding of the links between identity and medium and a critique of articulations that rely on single, monolithic, and univocal definitions of writing. Chinese writing–with its history of divergent readings in Chinese and non-Chinese contexts, with its current reinvention in the age of new media and globalization–can teach us how to read and construct mediality and cultural identity in interculturally responsible ways and also how to scrutinize, critique, and yet appreciate and enjoy the powerful multi-medial creativity embodied in writing.]

—–. “World-Literature Hospitality: China, Latin American, Translation.” In Kuei-fen Chiu and Yingjin Zhang, eds., The Making of Chinese-Sinophone Literatures as World Literature. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2022, 103-121.

—–. “Of (Other) Chinese Spaces: Sinophone Literature and the Rainforest.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed., A World History of Chinese Literature. New York: Routledge, 2023, 156-66.

—–. “Sinotopias.” In Andrea Bachner, Howard Chiang, and Yu-lin Lee, eds., Sinoglossia. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2023, 229-36.

Bachner, Andrea, Howard Chiang, and Yu-lin Lee, eds., Sinoglossia. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2023.

Balcom, John. “To the Heart of Exile: The Poetic Odyssey of Luo Fu.” In Christopher Lupke ed., New Perspectives on Contemporary Chinese Poetry, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007: 65-84.

Barmé, Geremie R. In the Red: On Contemporary Chinese Culture. NY: Columbia UP, 1999. [ch 3, “Traveling Heavy,” is on intellectual and cultural diaspora / exile etc]

Bernards, Brian. Writing the South Seas: Imagining the Nanyang in Chinese and Southeast Asian Postcolonial Literature. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016.

[Abstract: Postcolonial literature about the South Seas, or Nanyang, examines the history of Chinese migration, localization, and interethnic exchange in Southeast Asia, where Sinophone settler cultures evolved independently by adapting to their “New World” and mingling with native cultures. Writing the South Seas explains why Nanyang encounters, neglected by most literary histories, should be considered crucial to the national literatures of China and Southeast Asia]

—–. “Sinophone Literature.” In Kirk A. Denton, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia University Press, 2016, 72-79.

—–. “Iridescent Corners: Sinophone Flash Fiction in Singapore.” Prism 19, 2 (2022): 374-93.

[Abstract: Starting in the 1970s, flash fiction developed into an outsized literary practice relative to other Sinophone forms in Singapore. Flash fiction’s smallness and brevity cohere with the fast pace of urban Singaporean life and transformation of its cityscape, the compartmentalized relationship between the nation’s four official languages, the marginality of literary spaces and challenges to maintaining literature as a profession, and Southeast Asia’s relative obscurity as a world literary center (with Singapore as a small but important connective hub). Taking Yeng Pway Ngon’s fleeting scene of Speakers’ Corner (a flash platform of “gestural politics”) as a point of departure, this article charts a short history of Sinophone flash and its relationship to literary community building in Singapore through integrative readings of representative works by Jun Yinglü, Ai Yu, Wong Meng Voon, Xi Ni Er, and Wu Yeow Chong, recognizing their formal and thematic intersections not as “big ideas in tiny spaces” but as iridescent corners that traverse the state’s cultural, political, and geographical out-of-bounds (OB) markers. Rather than privileging professional mastery, their works trace flash fiction’s iridescent literariness and worldliness to hyperlocality (the physical and literary “corners” they illuminate), compressed temporality, a participatory culture of authorship, and a spirit of amateurism. This amateurism is derived not from a sense of linguistic underdevelopment or technical lack among these authors, but from their passionate and vulnerable engagement with the flash form, as well as the dissident moral conscience of their thematically and stylistically intersecting critiques of Singapore’s sociopolitical OB markers.]

Brady, Anne-Marie. “Dead in Exile: The Life and Death of Gu Cheng and Xie Ye.” China Information XI, 4 (1997): 126-148.

Chan, Cheow Thia. Malaysian Crossings: Place and Language in the Worlding of Modern Chinese Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 2022. [MCLC Resource Center review by Carlos Rojas]

[Abstract: Malaysian Chinese (Mahua) literature is marginalized on several fronts. Cheow Thia Chan demonstrates that Mahua authors’ grasp of their marginality in the world-Chinese literary space has been the impetus for—rather than a barrier to—aesthetic inventiveness. By emphasizing the inner diversities and connected histories in the margins, Malaysian Crossings offers a powerful argument for remapping global Chinese literature and world literature.]

—–. “Off-Center Articulations: Social Class, Postcolonial Singapore, and Reorienting Southeast Asian Chinese Literary Studies.” Prism 19, 2 (2022): 35-73.

[Abstract: Recent studies on Singapore Chinese literature have employed analytical lenses such as the Sinophone and postloyalism, which are exogenous to the historical and everyday experiences in the region that produced the texts. This article proposes using the lens of the Chinese-educated to bridge local self-understandings with extralocal modes of interpretation, in order to better illuminate place-specific writing practices. As a salient category of both lived experience and analysis by local researchers, the category of the Chinese-educated occasions a form of “off-center articulation” that maintains strategic distance from Sinophone studies while also enriching the field’s conceptual repertoire. Specifically, this analytical perspective highlights how literary representations of social class play a significant role, alongside language and ethnicity, in registering the historical diversity of the Singapore Chinese community. Through examining Singaporean Chinese writer Chia Joo Ming’s novel Exile or Pursuit (2015), this article reinterprets the novel’s gallery of characters and depictions of interpersonal relations to elicit fading memories of socioeconomic divides and gaps in cultural attainment among ethnic Chinese Singaporeans and their migrant predecessors. It ends by charting future directions for Southeast Asian Chinese literary studies that collectively track a broader locus of “Chinese-educated” literary and cultural practices, and that promote critical inter-referencing within the region.]

Chan, Cheow Thia and Carlos Rojas, eds. “The Worlds of Southeast Asian Chinese Literature,” special issue of Prism 19, 2 (2022).

Chang, Chung-An. “Comparative Literature in Taiwan in the Age of World Literature.” Journal of World Literature 9, 2 (May 2024): 262-80.

Chau, Angie. “Paris and the Art of Transposition, 1920s-1940s.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed., A World History of Chinese Literature. New York: Routledge, 2023, 49-61.

Chao, Di-kai and Riccardo Moratto. “Seeing Others: Ethics of Ghost Narrative in Sinophone Hong Kong Literature.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 36, 1 (2024): 52-83.

[Abstract: Inspired by the Sinophone discourse on translocality, this paper analyzes Mak Shu Kin’s novella “Slow and Long Night” (Manman changye, 2019), Tse Hiu-Hung’s short story “The Umbrellaless Ghost” (Wu zhe gui, 2015), and Tse’s novella “The City of Dissipating Streams” (Shi shui liu cheng, 2020). We analyze how ghosts in Mak’s text become symbolic of the characters trying to survive in a translocal context, while in Tse’s work, they express the significance of a community through différance and magical realism. We argue that these texts represent a new generation of Hong Kong writers who, through Hong Kong’s Sinophone “situatedness,” resort to ghost narratives to respond to an ethical commitment to the Other and a sense of community, thus enabling Hong Kong literature studies to move beyond the framework of “déjà disparu” or “anti-incorporation.”]

Chen, Jannis Jizhou. “The Feeling of Ling (the Numinous): Human-Animal Relations in Three Sinophone Short Stories.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 33, 2  (Fall 2021): 169-204.

ChenLingchei Letty. “When Does ‘Diaspora’ End and ‘Sinophone’ Begin?’ Postcolonial Studies 18, 1 (2015): 5266.

Chia-Cian, Ko. “Chinese-Language Memories under the Conflagration of War: On the Martyrdom of Chung Ling High School’s Teachers and Students.” Tr. Sun Pingyu. Prism 19, 2 (2022): 394-410.

[Abstract: As a Chinese-medium educational institution, Chung Ling High School (CLHS) in Penang enjoyed an illustrious reputation in the Malayan era. During the fall of Penang in World War II, the deaths of eight teachers and forty-six students from CLHS marked a painful episode in the history of Penang’s intellectual community, manifested in their sense of trauma and reflections on the crisis of Chinese education. After CLHS was reopened during the postwar period, the school set up a committee to commemorate the sacrifices of its teachers and students through memorial services, erection of a monument, and publication of tribute books. Applying the theories of French historian Pierre Nora, this article discusses how the ensuing les lieux de mémoire (sites of memory) formed through the sacrifices of CLHS teachers and students, inscribing the plight of literary lineage and cultural severance, which in turn takes on the role of reviving and perpetuating the ethnic Chinese spirit. In this sense, the sacrifices of the CLHS teachers and students as “sites of memory” have become a part of the ethnic community’s collective memory. When we examine how war memory texts are constructed, the CLHS tragedy embeds the connections between Chinese education and the ethnic sentiments of the Chinese community during the Japanese occupation.]

Chiang, Howard and Alvin Wong, eds. Keywords in Queer Sinophone Studies. London: Routledge, 2020.

Chiang, Howard and Shu-mei Shih, eds. Sinophone Studies across Disciplines: A Reader. NY: Columbia University Press, 2024. [Table of Contents]

[Abstract: Sinophone studies—the study of Sinitic-language cultures and communities around the world—has become increasingly interdisciplinary over the past decade. Today, it spans not only literary studies and cinema studies but also history, anthropology, musicology, linguistics, art history, and dance. More and more, it is in conversation with fields such as postcolonial studies, settler-colonial studies, migration studies, ethnic studies, queer studies, and area studies. This reader presents the latest and most cutting-edge work in Sinophone studies, bringing together both senior and emerging scholars to highlight the interdisciplinary reach and significance of this vital field. It argues that Sinophone studies has developed a distinctive conceptualization of power at the convergence of different intellectual traditions, offering new approaches to questions of plurality, hierarchy, oppression, and resistance. In so doing, this book shows, Sinophone studies has provided valuable conceptual tools for the study of minoritized and racialized communities in diverse global settings. Essays also consider how the rise of China has affected Sinophone communities and the idea of Chineseness around the world, among other timely topics. Showcasing cross-fertilization and diversification that traverse and transcend conventional scholarly boundaries, Sinophone Studies Across Disciplines gives readers an unparalleled survey of the past, present, and future of this inherently interdisciplinary field.]

Chiu, Kuei-fen. “Empire of the Chinese Sign: The Question of Chinese Diasporic Imagination in Transnational Literary Production.” Journal of Asian Studies 67, 2 (May 2008): 593-620.

[Abstract: This paper begins with an examination of the burgeoning interest in literatures in Chinese. It argues that studies in literatures in Chinese map out a terrain where complex negotiations and interventions for different purposes are carried out. As studies in literatures in Chinese often imply a shift from the nation-state paradigm to the transnational paradigm, which implicitly celebrates diasporic imagination as a counterforce to the power of the nation-state, this paper proposes to examine the intersection of Chinese Malaysian literature and Taiwan literature at two specific moments of transnational literary production—the late 1970s to the mid-1980s and the late 1990s to the present—so as to demonstrate the unstable meanings of the diaspora sign. It highlights the importance of historicization in investigating phenomena of transnational cultural production and the need to reincorporate the notion of “place” into our agenda in conducting cultural critiques. The paper ends with a critique of the global city as a methodological concept and argues for a place paradigm without privileging the global city as a metaphor for transnational space.]

—–. “World Literature in an Age of Digital Technologies: Digital Archive, Wikepedia, and Goodreads.com.” In Kuei-fen Chiu and Yingjin Zhang, eds., The Making of Chinese-Sinophone Literatures as World Literature. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2022, 217-35.

—–. “Taiwanese Literature in Two Transnational Contexts: Sinophone Literature and World Literature.” In Peiyin Lin and Wen-chi Li, eds. Taiwanese Literature as World Literature. London: Bloomsbury, 2022, 19-34.

Chiu, Kuei-fen and Yingjin Zhang, eds., The Making of Chinese-Sinophone Literatures as World Literature. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2022. [MCLC Resource Center review by Dylan Suher]

[Abstract: In The Making of Chinese-Sinophone Literatures as World Literature, Kuei-fen Chiu and Yingjin Zhang aim to bridge the distance between the scholarship of world literature and that of Chinese and Sinophone literary studies. This edited volume advances research on world literature by bringing in new developments in Chinese/Sinophone literatures and adds a much-needed new global perspective on Chinese literary studies beyond the traditional national literature paradigm and its recent critique by Sinophone studies. In addition to a critical mapping of the domains of world literature, Sinophone literature, and world literature in Chinese to delineate the nuanced differences of these three disciplines, the book addresses the issues of translation, genre, and the impact of media and technology on our understanding of “literature” and “literary prestige.” It also provides critical studies of the complicated ways in which Chinese and Sinophone literatures are translated, received, and reinvested across various genres and media, and thus circulate as world literature. The issues taken up by the contributors to this volume promise fruitful polemical interventions in the studies of world literature from the vantage point of Chinese and Sinophone literatures.]

Chow, Rey. Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993.

Dirlik, Arif. “Literary Identity/Cultural Identity: Being Chinese in the Contemporary World.” MCLC Resource Center Publication (Sept. 2013).

Edmond, Jacob and Hilary Chung. “Yang Lian, Auckland and the Poetics of Exile.” In Yang Lian, Unreal City: A Chinese Poet in Auckland. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2006, 1-23.

Ehrenwirth, Rebecca. “Playing with the Canon: The Uncanny Pleasure of Intertextuality in the Works of Sinophone Thai writers Sima Gong and Zeng Xin.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 32, 2 (Fall 2020): 136-178.

—–. “Journey to a Foreign Land: Imagining Migration in Sinophone Literature from Thailand.” In Valentina Pedone and Miriam Castorina, eds., Words and Visions around/about Chinese Transnational Mobilities. Firenze: Firenze University Press, 2023, 141-58.

Eoyang, Eugene Chen. “Tianya, the Ends of the World or the Edge of Heaven: Comparative Literature at the Fin de Siècle.” In Yingjin Zhang ed., China in a Polycentric World: Essays in Chinese Comparative Literature. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998, 218-232; 280-282.

Fang, Weigui. “Zeitgeist and Literature: The Reception of Chinese Literature in Germany Until the First Half of the Twentieth Century.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed., A World History of Chinese Literature. New York: Routledge, 2023, 35-48.

Gao Xingjian and Yang Lian. Was hat uns das Exil gebracht? Ein Gespräch zwischen Gao Xingjian und Yang Lian über chinesische Literatur (What Has Exile Brought Us? A Conversation between Gao Xingjian and Yang Lian on Chinese Literature). Tr. Peter Hoffmann, Berlin: DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm, 2001.

—–. “The Language of Exile: When Pain Turns to Gain.” Abridged and translated by Ben Carrdus. In Index on Censorship (2002).

Graf, Emily. “The Rise of Author Museums in the PRC: How Institutions Make World Literature.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed., A World History of Chinese Literature. New York: Routledge, 2023, 107-20.

Groppe, Alison. Not Made in China: Inventing Local Identities in Contemporary Malaysian Chinese Fiction. PhD diss. Cambridge: Harvard University, 2006.

—–. “The Dis/Reappearance of Yu Dafu in Ng Kim Chew’s Fiction.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 22, 2 (Fall 2010): 161-95.

—–. Sinophone Malaysian Literature: Not Made in China. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2013. [MCLC Resource Center review by Tzu-hui Celina Hung]

[Abstract: China’s recent economic growth has fed a rapid increase in the study of modern Chinese language and literature globally. In this shifting global context, authors who work on the edges of the literary empire raise important questions about the homogeneity of language, identity, and culture that is produced by the modern Chinese literary canon. Sinophone Malaysian Literature: Not Made in China examines a key segment of this literature and asks, “What does it mean to be of Chinese descent and Chinese-speaking outside of China?” This book looks specifically at how diasporic Chinese subjects make sense of their Chinese and Malaysian identities in postcolonial Malaysia. By analyzing the literary texts of several of the most influential contemporary Malaysia-born, Chinese-language authors, the author shows how the texts’ complex explorations of sentimental attachments, cultural contexts, and sources of power form the basis for a contested, fractured, unstable, and yet enduring Chinese Malaysian identity. This book traces the development of this identity from negotiations with diverse cultural sources and often conflicting affiliations with the appointed centers of cultural productions in Beijing, Shanghai, Taipei, and Kuala Lumpur. The special value of the Sinophone Malaysian literary texts that form the focus of the book is that they place political and cultural affiliations of the Chinese-origin, Chinese-speaking Malaysians under a microscope, revealing intricacies and transformations that would otherwise remain invisible…]

Gvili, Gal. Imagining India in Modern China: Literary Decolonization and the Imperial Unconscious, 1895-1962. New York: Columbia University Press, 2022.

[Abstract: Gvili examines how Chinese writers’ image of India shaped the making of a new literature and spurred efforts to achieve literary decolonization. She argues that multifaceted visions of Sino-Indian connections empowered Chinese literary figures to resist Western imperialism and its legacies through novel forms and genres. However, Gvili demonstrates, the Global North and its authority mediated Chinese visions of Sino-Indian pasts and futures.]

Hashimoto, Satoru. Afterlives of Letters: The Transnational Origins of Modern Literature in China, Japan, and Korea. New York: Columbia University Press, 2023.

[Abstract: When East Asia opened itself to the world in the nineteenth century, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean intellectuals had shared notions of literature because of the centuries-long cultural exchanges in the region. As modernization profoundly destabilized cultural norms, they ventured to create new literature for the new era. Hashimoto offers a novel way of understanding the origins of modern literature in a transregional context, drawing on Chinese-, Japanese-, and Korean-language texts in both classical and vernacular forms. He argues that modern literature came into being in East Asia through writerly attempts at reconstructing the present’s historical relationship to the past across the cultural transformations caused by modernization. Hashimoto examines writers’ anachronistic engagement with past cultures deemed obsolete or antithetical to new systems of values, showing that this transnational process was integral to the emergence of modern literature. A groundbreaking cross-cultural excavation of the origins of modern literature in East Asia featuring remarkable linguistic scope, Afterlives of Letters bridges Asian studies and comparative literature and delivers a remapping of world literature.]

Hayot, Eric. “Commentary: On the ‘Sainifeng’ as a Global Literary Practice.” In Jing Tsu and David Der-wei Wang, eds., Global Chinese Literature: Critical Essays. Leiden: Brill, 2010, 219-28.

Hee, Wai-Siam. Remapping the Sinophone The Cultural Production of Chinese-Language Cinema in Singapore and Malaya before and during the Cold War. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2019.

[Abstract: In a work that will force scholars to re-evaluate how they approach Sinophone studies, Wai-Siam Hee demonstrates that many of the major issues raised by contemporary Sinophone studies were already hotly debated in the popular culture surrounding Chinese-language films made in Singapore and Malaya during the Cold War. Despite the high political stakes, the feature films, propaganda films, newsreels, documentaries, newspaper articles, memoirs, and other published materials of the time dealt in sophisticated ways with issues some mistakenly believe are only modern concerns. In the process, the book offers an alternative history to the often taken-for-granted versions of film and national history that sanction anything relating to the Malayan Communist Party during the early period of independence in the region as anti-nationalist. Drawing exhaustively on material from Asian, European, and North American archives, the author does not minimize the complexities produced by British colonialism and anticommunism, identity struggles of the Chinese Malayans, American anti-communism, and transnational Sinophone cultural interactions. Hee shows how Sinophone multilingualism and the role of the local, in addition to other theoretical problems, were both illustrated and practised in Cold War Sinophone cinema.]

—–. “The Lure of Diaspora: Diaspora Discourse, Accented Style, and Sinophone Malaysian Culture.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 33, 2  (Fall 2021): 205-257.

Henningsen, Lena. “Reading World Literature in Chinese Science Fiction.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed., A World History of Chinese Literature. New York: Routledge, 2023, 196-206.

Hillenbrand, Margaret. “Communitarianism, or, How to Build East Asian Theory.” Postcolonial Studies 13, 4 (2010): 317–334.

Hing, Chong Fah and Kyle Shernuk. “1960, October: Hunger and the Chinese Malaysian Leftist Narrative.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 635-40.

Hioe, Brian. “Calling for a Return to Sinocentrism in the Name of Opposing It: Responding to ‘Reconsidering Sinophone Studies.” New Bloom (July 2021).

Ho, Engseng. 2017. “Inter-Asian Concepts for Mobile Societies.” The Journal of Asian Studies 76, 4: 907–928.

Hockx, Michel. “From Writing to Roaming: World Literature and the Literary World of Black and Blue.” In Kuei-fen Chiu and Yingjin Zhang, eds., The Making of Chinese-Sinophone Literatures as World Literature. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2022, 203-16.

Holden, Philip. “Reading Between the Lines: Singapore Novels in a Global Frame.” In Anna Guttman, Michel Hockx and George Paizis, eds., The Global Literary Field. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006, 2-21.

Hoogervorst, Tom G. “Urban Life in Two 1920s Sino-Malay Poems.” Prism 19, 2 (2022): 454-73.

[Abstract: Batavia, the capital of the former Netherlands Indies, was home to a popular Chinese-run printing industry that published works in the Malay vernacular. Two 1920s Sino-Malay poems reveal firsthand accounts of the city’s vibrant sociocultural landscape. Sair park (The Poem of the Park) narrates everyday life at the parks of the colonial metropole, including the opportunities these urban spaces provide for illicit encounters between men and women. Pantoen tjapgome (The Quatrain of the Lantern Festival) describes the festivities of an important holiday that increasingly drifted away from its religious origins and became a public spectacle attended by people from different ethnicities. Together, these poems provide intricate and otherwise unavailable details of everyday life in late-colonial Java. They also reveal some of the anxieties faced by its Chinese-descended population, including the specter of cultural loss and unwarranted interaction between young people from different genders and racial backgrounds. Yet despite this apparent rejection of an Indies-style hybrid modernity, an examination of the language of these poems—Batavia Malay with a substantial influence from Hokkien, the Sinitic variety historically spoken by many Chinese-Indonesian families—demonstrates that they are best approached as examples of Chinese-Indonesian acculturation.]

Hoogervorst, Tom and Caroline Chia, eds. Sinophone Southeast Asia: Voices across the Southern Seas. Leiden: Brill, 2021.

[Abstract: This volume explores the diverse linguistic landscape of Southeast Asia’s Chinese communities. Based on archival research and previously unpublished linguistic fieldwork, it unearths a wide variety of language histories, linguistic practices, and trajectories of words. The localized and often marginalized voices we bring to the spotlight are quickly disappearing in the wake of standardization and homogenization, yet they tell a story that is uniquely Southeast Asian in its rich hybridity. Our comparative scope and focus on language, analysed in tandem with history and culture, adds a refreshing dimension to the broader field of Sino-Southeast Asian Studies.]

Hu, Ying. “Nora in China.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed., A World History of Chinese Literature. NY: Routledge, 2023, 288-96.

Huang, Yibing. “Duoduo: An Impossible Farewell, or, Exile between Revolution and Modernism.” Amerasia Journal 27, 2 (2001): 64-85

—–. “The Ghost Enters the City: Gu Cheng’s Metamorphosis in the ‘New World.'” In Christopher Lupke, ed., New Perspectives on Contemporary Chinese Poetry. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 123-43.

Hubert, Rosario. Disoriented Disciplines: China, Latin America, and the Shape of World Literature. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2023.

[Abstract: In the absence of specialized programs of study, abstract discussions of China in Latin America took shape in contingent critical infrastructures built at the crossroads of the literary market, cultural diplomacy, and commerce. As Rosario Hubert reveals, modernism flourishes comparatively, in contexts where cultural criticism is a creative and cosmopolitan practice. Disoriented Disciplines: China, Latin America, and the Shape of World Literature understands translation as a material act of transfer, decentering the authority of the text and connecting seemingly untranslatable cultural traditions. In this book, chinoiserie, “coolie” testimonies, Maoist prints, visual poetry, and Cold War memoirs compose a massive archive of primary sources that cannot be read or deciphered with the conventional tools of literary criticism. As Hubert demonstrates, even canonical Latin American authors, including Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, and Haroldo de Campos, write about China from the edges of philology, mediating the concrete as well as the sensorial. Advocating for indiscipline as a core method of comparative literary studies, Disoriented Disciplines challenges us to interrogate the traditional contours of the archives and approaches that define the geopolitics of knowledge.]

Hutt, Michael. “Reading Nepali Maoist Memoirs.” Studies in Nepali History and Society 17, no. 1 (June 2012): 107–142.

Iwasaki, Clara. Rethinking the Modern Chinese Canon: Refractions across the Pacific. Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2020. [MCLC Resource Center review by Kyle Shernuk]

Janssen, Ronald R. “What History Cannot Write: Bei Dao and Recent Chinese Poetry.” Critical Asian Studies 34, 2 (2002): 259-277.

Johns-Putra, Adeline, Xi Liu, Loredana Cesarino, Guohong Mai, and Yue Zhou. “Whose World? Whose World Literature? Looking for Climate Fiction in China.” In Alice DuhanStefan HelgessonChristina Kullberg, and Paul Tenngart, eds., Literature and the Work of Universality. De Gruyter, 2024, 315-332. 

Kenley, David L. New Culture in a New World: The May Fourth Movement and the Chinese Diaspora in Singapore, 1919¡-1932. London: Routledge, 2003.

Khoo, Olivia. The Chinese Exotic: Modern Diasporic Femininity. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008.

[Abstract: examines new representations of diasporic Chinese femininity emerging from Asia Pacific modernities since the late twentieth century. Through an analysis of cultural artefacts such as films, popular fiction, food and fashion cultures, the book challenges the dominant tendency in contemporary cultural politics to define Chinese femininity from a mainland perspective that furthermore equates it with notions of primitivism. Rather, the book argues for a radical reconfiguration of the concept of exoticism as a frame for understanding these new representations.This engaging study raises important questions on the relationship between the Chinese diasporas and gender. The Chinese Exotic provides a timely critical intervention into the current visualizations of diasporic Chinese femininity. The book contends that an analysis of such images can inform the reconfigured relations between China, the Chinese diasporas, Asia and the West in the context of contemporary globalization, and in turn takes these new intersections to account for the complex nature of modern definitions of diasporic Chinese femininity.]

Khor, Boon Eng. “Counter-discourse: Strategies of Representing Ethnic Minorities in Sinophone Malaysian Literature.” Prism 19, 2 (2022): 428-37.

[Abstract: Since independence, the ethnic Chinese community in Malaysia has lamented its marginalization by the Malay-Bumiputra elite, a theme that is often reflected in writings by ethnically Chinese Malaysian authors. This article, however, examines how ethnic Chinese authors depict other ethnic minorities, focusing on four approaches to forging counter-discourses used in the literary representation of minorities: binary opposition, rhetorical questions, paradoxical statements, and bystander narration. The discussion of each narrative strategy is supported by examples from works by writers from different eras, regions, genders, and generations. These modes of counter-discourse foreground minority voices and create a meaningful dialogue between the Sinophone community and other ethnic groups. Through these counter-discursive explorations, Mahua authors portray the Chinese in Malaysia in relation to other ethnic minorities. In some cases, we can also observe how Mahua authors employ this counter-discourse structure as a form of resistance against hegemonic state power.]

Kleeman, Faye Yuan. In Transit: The Formation of a Colonial East Asian Cultural Sphere. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2014.

[Abstract: This work examines the creation of an East Asian cultural sphere by the Japanese imperial project in the first half of the twentieth century. It seeks to re-read the “Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere” not as a mere political and ideological concept but as the potential site of a vibrant and productive space that accommodated transcultural interaction and transformation. By reorienting the focus of (post)colonial studies from the macro-narrative of political economy, military institutions, and socio-political dynamics, it uncovers a cultural and personal understanding of life within the Japanese imperial enterprise. To engage with empire on a personal level, one must ask: What made ordinary citizens participate in the colonial enterprise? What was the lure of empire? How did individuals not directly invested in the enterprise become engaged with the idea? Explanations offered heretofore emphasize the potency of the institutional or ideological apparatus. Kleeman asserts, however, that desire and pleasure may be better barometers for measuring popular sentiment in the empire–what Raymond Williams refers to as the “structure of feeling” that accompanied modern Japan’s expansionism. The negative impact of Japanese imperialism on both nations and societies has been amply demonstrated and cannot be denied, but In Transit focuses on the opportunities and unique experiences it afforded a number of extraordinary individuals to provide a full- er picture of Japanese colonial culture. By observing the empire–from Tokyo to remote Mongolia and colonial Taiwan, it explores an area of colonial experience that straddles the public and the private, the national and the personal, thereby revealing a new aspect of the colonial condition and its postcolonial implications.]

Klein, Lucas. “One Part in Concert, and One Part Repellence: Liu Waitong, Cao Shuying, and the Question of Hong Kong and Mainland Chinese Sinophones.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 30, 2  (Fall 2018): 141-172.

—–. “Assimilation or DetentionPoetic Form and the Retranslation of the Angel Island Poems.” Prism 20, 1 (2023): 96-116.

[Abstract: How are the migration of people and of poetry, through literary translation and translational literature, linked or alike? What can the poetry of migration teach about the translation of form in poetry? What is the role of the text in understanding the politics of poetry in politicized contexts? Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910–1940 is an important collection and translation of poems etched in the walls of the Angel Island detention center. Though the Angel Island poems were mostly composed after the 1919 vernacular revolution in Chinese literature, they were written in classical Chinese and premodern forms. Island translates them into stiff free-verse academic English, asking English-language readers to imaginatively project poetic beauty onto the originals. Other translations, such as Teow Lim Goh’s Islanders (2016) and Jeffrey Thomas Leong’s Wild Geese Sorrow (2018), render the poems with more attention to the dominant styles of contemporary American poetry. This article argues for a retranslation of the Angel Island poems—not into free verse but with formalist attention to meter and rhyme in English. Such translations could blur the dichotomy between the former’s target-oriented poetics and the latter’s source-oriented translations and also offer a stronger migration into English for the poetry of these migrants.]

Klöter, Henning and Mårten Söderblom Saarela, eds. Language Diversity in the Sinophone World: Historical: Trajectories, Language Planning, and Multilingual Practices. London: Routledge, 2020. [MCLC Resource Center review by Ashley Liu].

Kong, Belinda. Tiananmen Fictions Outside the Square: The Chinese Literary Diaspora and the Politics of Global Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012.

[Abstract: An exciting analysis of the myriad literary effects of Tiananmen, Belinda Kong’s Tiananmen Fictions Outside the Square is the first full-length study of fictions related to the 1989 movement and massacre. More than any other episode in recent world history, Tiananmen has brought a distinctly politicized Chinese literary diaspora into stark relief. Kong redefines Tiananmen’s meaning from an event that ended in local political failure to one that succeeded in producing a vital dimension of contemporary transnational writing today. She spotlights key writers—Gao Xingjian, Ha Jin, Annie Wang, and Ma Jian—who have written and published about the massacre from abroad. Their outsider/distanced perspectives inform their work, and reveal how diaspora writers continually reimagine Tiananmen’s relevance to the post-1989 world at large. Compelling us to think about how Chinese culture, identity, and politics are being defined in the diaspora, Tiananmen Fictions Outside the Square candidly addresses issues of political exile, historical trauma, global capital, and state biopower.]

Kong, Shuyu. “Diaspora Literature.” In Joshua Mostow, ed, and Kirk A. Denton, China section, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literature. NY: Columbia UP, 2003, 546-53.

—–. “Diaspora in Modern Chinese Literature.” In Kirk A. Denton, ed., Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia University Press, 2016, 62-71.

Kramer, Oliver. “No Past to Long For? A Sociology of Chinese Writers in Exile.” In Michel Hockx ed., The Literary Field of Twentieth-Century China. Richmond: Curzon, 1999, 161-177

—–. Chinese Fiction Abroad: The Exilic Nature of Works Written by Chinese Writers Living Abroad after the Tiananmen Massacre. PhD diss. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh, 2002.

Kubin, Wolfgang. “Das Ende des Propheten: Chinesischer Geist und chinesische Dichtung im 20. Jahrhundert” (The End of the Prophet: Chinese Spirit and Chinese Poetry in the 20 th Century). In Die horen. Zeitschrift für Literatur, Kunst und Kritik 169 (1993): 75-91

—–. “The End of the Prophet: Chinese Poetry between Modernity and Postmodernity.” In Wendy Larson and Anne Wedell-Wedellsborg eds., Inside Out: Modernism and Postmodernism in Chinese Literary Culture. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1993, 19-37.

Larson, Wendy. “Space, Place, and Distance: Gao Xingjian, Mo Yan, and the Novel in World Literature.” In Kuei-fen Chiu and Yingjin Zhang, eds., The Making of Chinese-Sinophone Literatures as World Literature. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2022, 145-63.

Lee, Gregory, ed. Chinese Writing and Exile, Select Papers, vol 7. Chicago: The Center for East Asian Studies, University of Chicago, 1993. [contributions by Gregory Lee, Leo Ou-fan Lee, Wang-chi Wong, Susan Daruvala, CH Wang]

—–. Troubadours, Trumpeters, Troubled Makers: Lyricism, Nationalism, and Hybridity in China and Its Others. London: Hurst, 1996.

Lee, Karen An-hwei. Anglophone Literatures in the Asian Diaspora: Literary Transnationalism and Translingual Migrations. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2013.

[Abstract: Conversant in critical and creative modes of thought, this book examines the uses of translation in Asian and Anglophone literatures to bridge discontinuous subjectivities in Eurasian transnational identities and translingual hybridizations of literary Modernism. Anglophone Literatures in the Asian Diaspora focuses on the roles of mysticism and language in Dict?e’s poetic deconstruction of empire, engaging metaphysical issues salient in the history of translation studies to describe how Theresa Cha and four other authors–Sui Sin Far, Chuang Hua, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Virginia Woolf–used figurative and actual translations to bridge discontinuous subjectivities. The author Karen Lee’s explorations of linguistic politics and poetics in this eclectic group of writers concentrates on the play of innovative language deployed to negotiate divided or multiple consciousness.]

Lee, Tong King. “Mobility as Method: Distributed Literatures and Semiotic Repertoires.” MCLC Resource Center Publication (March 2019).

—–. “Memesis and Contemporary Chinese Poetry: A Distributed View on World Literature.” In Kuei-fen Chiu and Yingjin Zhang, eds., The Making of Chinese-Sinophone Literatures as World Literature. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2022, 164-85.

Li, Dian. The Chinese Poetry of Bei Dao, 1978-2000: Resistance and Exile. Lewiston, ME: Edwin Mellen Press, 2006.

Li, Jessica Tsui Yan. “Female Body and Identities: Re-presenting Ibsen’s Nora in China Doll.” In K.K. Tam, Terry S. Yip and Frode Helland eds., Ibsen and the Modern Self. Hong Kong: Open University of Hong Kong Press, and Oslo: Centre for Ibsen’s Studies, University of Oslo Publications, 2010, 298-310.

Liao, Ping-hui. “Sinophone Literature.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed. A Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2016, 134-47.

Lin, Julia C. “Yip Wai-lim (1937-): A Poet of Exile.” In Lin, Essays on Contemporary Chinese Poetry. Athens: Ohio UP, 1985, 110-33.

Lin, Peiyin. “Worlding Modalities of Taiwanese Literature: Family Saga, Autobiographical Narrative, and Bildungsroman.” In Pei-yin Lin and Wen-chi Li, eds., Taiwanese Literature as World Literature. London: Bloomsbury, 2023, 51-67.

Lin, Peiyin and Wen-chi Li, eds. Taiwanese Literature as World Literature. London: Bloomsbury, 2022. [MCLC Resource Center review by Lingchei Letty Chen]

[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 more systematically introduced to world readers through translation. Over the past few decades, Taiwanese authors and their translated works have participated in global conversations, such as those on climate change, the “post-truth” era, and ethnic and gender equality. Bringing together scholars and translators from Europe, North America, and East Asia, the volume focuses on three interrelated themes-the framing and worlding ploys of Taiwanese literature, Taiwanese writers’ experience of transculturation, and politics behind translating Taiwanese literature. It aims to stimulate new ways of conceptualizing Taiwanese literature, demonstrate remarkable cases of Taiwanese authors’ co-option of world trends in their Taiwan-concerned writing, and explore its readership and dissemination.]

Liu, Tao Tao. “Exile, Homesickness and Displacement in Modern Chinese Literature.” In Wolfgang Kubin ed., Symbols of Anguish: In Search of Melancholy in China. Bern: Peter Lang, 2001, 335-351.

Liu, Yan. “Understanding World Literature in China Today.” Journal of World Literature 9, 2 (May 2024): 246-61.

Lovell, Julia. The Politics of Cultural Capital: China’s Quest for a Nobel Prize in Literature. Honolulu: Hawai’i UP, 2006, 144-152.

—–. “Chinese Literature in the Global Canon: The Quest for Recognition.” In Jing Tsu and David Der-wei Wang, eds., Global Chinese Literature: Critical Essays. Leiden: Brill, 2010, 197-218.

Lu, Sheldon. “The Early Modern Period, Dream of the Red Chamber, and World Literature.” Journal of World Literature 9, 2 (May 2024): 207-25.

Lua, Shirley O. “Recreating the World in Twenty-first Century Philippine Chinese Speculative Fiction.” Prism 19, 2 (2022): 491-508.

[Abstract: This article surveys contemporary Filipino Chinese authors’ interest in speculative fiction. Many of the authors of this burgeoning movement were included in the anthology Lauriat: A Filipino-Chinese Speculative Fiction Anthology (2012), edited by Charles A. Tan. These authors find speculative fiction a fruitful genre for combining Western literary techniques and material gleaned from Philippine myth and folklore.]

Luo, Hui. “Line, Loop, Constellation: Classical Chinese Poetry Between Sinophone and Anglophone Worlds.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed., A World History of Chinese Literature. New York: Routledge, 2023, 62-73.

Mangalagiri, Adhira. “A Poetics of the Writers’ Conference: Literary Relation in the Cold War World.” Comparative Literature Studies 58, 3 (2021): 509-531.

[Abstract: This article offers a poetics of the writers’ conference as conducted via channels of Cold War–era cultural diplomacy through a reading of the Asian Writers’ Conference (New Delhi, 1956), a largely forgotten predecessor of the better-known Afro-Asian Writers’ Conferences. Focusing particularly on the Chinese writers in attendance, I read the conference literarily, with an eye to its aesthetics and the particular performance of transnational literary relation that it engendered. The Conference’s fortuitous confluence with the Hundred Flowers Campaign in China unexpectedly made possible an approach to transnational literary exchange that actively eschewed and rebelled against state intervention in the literary sphere. As such, the Asian Writers’ Conference effected a form of transnational literary relation that thrived in its self-avowed uselessness to mandates of diplomacy. The Conference warns against the tendency in South–South studies to valorize the decentering of colonial powers as cultural mediators without a critical engagement with the nation-state’s overseeing presence once it occupies that agential role in transnational literary exchange.]

Martin, Fran. “Transnational Queer Sinophone Cultures.” In Mark McLelland and Mackie Vera, eds, Routledge Handbook of Sexuality Studies in East Asia. New York: Routledge, 2015, 35–48.

McDougall, Bonnie S.. “World Literature, Global Culture and Contemporary Chinese Literature in Translation.” International Communication of Chinese Culture 1, 1-2 (2014): 47-64.

Møller-Olsen, Astrid. Sensing the Sinophone: Urban Memoryscapes in Contemporary Fiction. Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2021.

[Abstract: Through an original framework of literary sensory studies, this monograph provides a comparative analysis of how six contemporary works of Sinophone fiction reimagine the links between the self and the city, the past and the present, as well as the physical and the imaginary. It explores the connection between elusive memories and material cityscapes through the matrix of the senses. Joining recent efforts to imagine world literature beyond the international, Sensing the Sinophone engages in a triangular comparison of fiction from Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Taipei—three Sinophone cities, each with its own strong urban identity thatc comes with unique cultural and linguistic hybridities.]

Ng, Kim Chew. “Minor Sinophone Literature: Diasporic Modernity’s Incomplete Journey.” In Jing Tsu and David Der-wei Wang, eds., Global Chinese Literature: Critical Essays. Leiden: Brill, 2010, 15-28.

—–. (黃錦樹) (2018) “這樣的“華語語系”論可以休矣!──史書美的“反離散”到底在反甚麼?” (Such ‘Sinophone studies’ should stop! What exactly is Shu-mei Shih’s ‘against diaspora’ up against?). Speaking of Books, (Jan. 2, 2018). URL: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/yotu/1k6GM8rSYbo [in Chinese].

—–. “Why Does a Failed Revolution Also Need Fiction?: On the Mahua Genre of Failed Revolutionary Historical Fiction.” Tr. Po-hsi Chen. Prism 19, 2 (2022): 411-27.

[Abstract: The historical relationship between the categories of Malayan Communist fiction and People’s Republic of China revolutionary historical fiction remains to be clarified, just as the Malayan Communist revolution was covertly, but undeniably, connected to the Chinese Communist Party. This essay attempts to take the PRC’s revolutionary historical fiction as a reference point to reinvestigate Malayan Communist fiction, which was characterized as “historical fiction” by left-wing writers. Examples include Jin Zhimang’s Hunger, Liu Jun’s Wind Blowing in the Woods, and Tuo Ling’s The Hoarse Mangrove Forest. The key issue is that the PRC’s revolutionary historical fiction is premised on triumphalism, to authenticate the revolution’s legitimacy, while Malayan Communists’ revolutionary historical fiction hinges instead on the failure of revolution—though it cannot be recognized as such. How do these latter works contemplate and represent revolution? Does fiction have to rationalize the legitimacy of a failed revolution (or one mired in predicaments)? Or does fiction attempt to accomplish something else? These questions may concern the raison d’être of Malayan Chinese literary realism, which takes representing reality as its mission and investigates its underlying paradoxes.]

Park, Sowon S., ed. “The Chinese Scriptworld and World Literature,” special issue of Journal of World Literature 1, 2 (2016).

Parker, David. “Going with the Flow?: Reflections on Recent Chinese Diaspora Studies.” Diaspora: A Journal of Translational Studies 14, 2/3 (Fall/Winter 2005): 411-23.

Peng, Hsiao-yen 彭小妍. 2008. “The Writing of Literary History and the Position of Hong Kong Literature in Sinophone Literature” (文學史的編撰與香港文學在華文文學中的定位). Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 8, no. 2/9, no. 1: 40–50.

Qian, Nanxiu, Richard J. Smith, and Bowei Zhang, eds. Rethinking the Sinopshere: Poetics, Aesthetics, and Identity Formation. Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2020.

—–. Reexamining the Sinosphere: Transmissions and Transformations in East Asia. Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2020.

[Abstract: For hundreds of years, into the twentieth century, the culture groups in the areas we now know as China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam shared a great many political and social values, religious beliefs, and artistic and literary traditions. These common cultural features were recorded and transmitted in the same basic written language—classical or literary Chinese (known as guwen/wenyan in China, Kanbun in Japan, Hanmun in Korea, and Hánvan in Vietnam). The umbrella term for this shared language is “literary Sinitic”—a term designed to recognize the fact that although guwen/wenyan originally developed in China, it had a vibrant life of its own in other areas of East Asia . . .  This huge but understudied body of written documents offers extraordinarily rich resources for examining issues of cultural continuity and change in this important region of the world. Unfortunately, in the aftermath of the political and social turmoil in East Asia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, all four cultures abandoned their use of literary Sinitic. As a result, a great many documents written in this important script have been ignored, leaving a substantial gap in our understanding of the relationship between the histories and cultures of premodern East Asia. Like its companion volume, Rethinking the Sinosphere, this book seeks to fill this gap. One of the primary goals of this study is to break down the intellectual and cultural barriers that have made the Sinosphere difficult to see for itself. These barriers are of two sorts. One is the academic tendency toward intense specialization; most scholars of East Asia focus on a single country, a well-defined period, and an equally well-defined discipline (linguistics, philosophy, history, literature, art, etc.). Another is the tendency of scholars to privilege the country and period they study, and to adhere closely to their disciplinary training and outlook. To break down these barriers, a group of highly accomplished scholars committed to cross-cultural comparisons and interdisciplinary perspectives have been selected for this volume, and the result is a careful and critical examination of the complex cultural interactions that took place in premodern East Asia.]

Qin, Liyan. “Engaging the World in Republican Literature.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed., A World History of Chinese Literature. New York: Routledge, 2023, 98-106.

Rojas, Carlos. “‘Tell My Mother I’m Sorry’: On Chinese as a Minor Discourse.” Chinese Literature Today 7, 1 (2018): 143-52.

[Abstract: Taking its inspiration from a line in Chinese that appears in an episode of the popular US television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, this essay reflects on the broader phenomenon of minor or minoritized discourses and, specifically, insofar as it relates to modern Chinese literature. The focus, however, is not on discursive formations positioned at the margins of what might be regarded as mainstream Chinese literature (such as ethnic minority literature, Sinophone literature, and so forth), but rather on works by authors who may be viewed as paradigmatically canonical.]

—–. ‘A New Species’: Gender, Sexuality, and Taxonomic Logics in Sinophone East Asia.” Prism 17, 2 (2020).

—–. “Worlding Taiwan: Taiwanese Literature’s Contingent Constructions.” In Pei-yin Lin and Wen-chi Li, eds., Taiwanese Literature as World Literature. London: Bloomsbury, 2022, 35-50.

—–. “Introduction: Worlds Built of Sand.” Prism 19, 2 (2022): 265-82.

[Abstract: Opening with a discussion of Singaporean artist Charles Lim Yi Yong’s multiyear art project SEASTATE (2005–), this introduction uses Singapore’s recent land reclamation efforts to reflect on more general processes of world building in Sinophone Southeast Asia. More specifically, the essay considers how multiple waves of migration from China to Southeast Asia have resulted in a wide array of Chinese communities throughout the region, and how modern literature may be used as a prism through which to examine some of the sociocultural formations that have been generated by these waves of migration from China throughout Southeast Asia. The essay considers how literature reflects the region’s diverse array of Sinitic communities, or “worlds,” and how literary production may be viewed as a process of world making in its own right. Although this special issue covers considerable territory (both literally and metaphorically), our objective is not to offer a comprehensive survey of all modern literary production from the entire region. Instead, we seek to showcase a set of novel approaches that may be used to examine the region’s eclectic body of literary production, including approaches grounded in concepts of mesology, postloyalism, inter-imperiality, oceanic epistemologies, off-center articulations, and the condition of being “semi-wild.”]

—–. “Demolishing Script: China and 拆那 (Chai-na).” In Andrea Bachner, Howard Chiang, and Yu-lin Lee, eds., Sinoglossia. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2023, 225-28.

—–. “Chinese Writing, Heptapod B, and Martian Script: The Ethnocentric Bases of Language.” In Andrea Bachner, Howard Chiang, and Yu-lin Lee, eds., Sinoglossia. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2023, 110-27.

Saussy, Haun. “Some Under Heaven: World Literature and the Deceptiveness of Labels.” Journal of World Literature 9, 2 (May 2024): 177-86

Schweiger, Irmy. “Beyond Chineseness: De-nationalising and De-sinicising Modern Chinese Literature.” In Stefan Helgesson, Annika Mörte Alling, Yvonne Lindqvist, and Helena Wulff, eds., World Literatures: Exploring the Cosmopolitan-Vernacular Exchange. Stockholm: Stockholm University Press, 2018, 42-58.

Shen, Shuang. “Popular Literature in the Inter-imperial Space of Hong Kong and Singapore/Malaya.” Prism 19, 2 (2022): 301-218.

[Abstract: This article addresses the neglect toward popular literary networks with Hong Kong in the Cold War period by influential Mahua scholars. Aiming to make way for a more robust discourse of cultural politics in tandem with a regional conceptualization of Sinophone cultural production, the article proposes to understand popular forms such as romance fiction as arising from and coconstituting a regional Sinosphere that can only be understood, following Laura Doyle’s recent study, as inter-imperial. Offering a reading of the Hong Kong writer Liu Yichang’s romantic fiction and immigrant stories, I show how the stories signify a geopolitical reckoning with the Cold War patterning of the world. This perspective offers more ways for us to evaluate how the regional literary field intersected with the Cold War beyond the singular defense of its “literariness.”]

Shi, Flair Donglai. “Post-Mao Chinese Literature as World Literature: Struggling with the Systematic and the Allegorical.” Comparative Literature & World Literature 1, 2 (Spring 2016): 20-34.

—–. “Reconsidering Sinophone Studies: The Chinese Cold War, Multiple Sinocentrisms, and Theoretical Generalisation.” International Journal of Taiwan Studies 4, 2 (2021).

Shih, Shu-mei. “Globalization and the (In)significance of Taiwan.” Postcolonial Studies 6, 2 (2003): 143–153.

—–. “Global Literature and the Technologies of Recognition.” PMLA 119, 1 (2004): 16-30.

—–. Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations Across the Pacific. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. [MCLC Resource Center review by Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu]

—–. 2008. “Hong Kong Literature as Sinophone Literature.” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 8, 2/9, 1 (2008): 12–18.

—–. “Against Diaspora: The Sinophone as Places of Cultural Production.” In Jing Tsu and David Der-wei Wang, eds., Global Chinese Literature: Critical Essays. Leiden: Brill, 2010, 29-48.

—–. “The Concept of the Sinophone.” PMLA 126, 3 (2011): 709–718.

—–. “World Studies and Relational Comparison.” PMLA 130, 2 (2015): 430–438.

—–. “What Is Sinophone Studies” [in Chinese]. The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture 9, 2 (June 2016): 105-23.

[Abstract: Due to the fact that Western colonialism is largely oceanic and the fact that China has long been considered victim of Western colonialism, it is easy for us to overlook China’s internal colonization of various indigenous peoples and the critical role Chinese migrants played in the colonization of Taiwan and parts of Southeast Asia. With the rise of China, these phenomena are more and more worthy of our attention. Sinophone studies attends to the difference between the Chinese mode of colonization and other modes of colonization through a dialogue with at least the following three academic discourses. To begin with, Anglophone and Francophone postcolonial studies gives the false impression that only Western powers are capable of colonizing Asia. Furthermore, the casting of Chinese migration to Taiwan and Southeast Asia in terms of diaspora conceals its settler colonial character. Finally, terms like literature in Chinese and Chinese literature are problematic categories when it comes to literatures written in Sinitic languages. In fact, Sinophone is multilingual, polyphonic, and also poly-scriptic. I argue that Sinophone studies takes as its objects of study the Sinitic-language communities and cultures outside China as well as ethnic minority communities and cultures within China where Mandarin Chinese is adopted or imposed. It is because these linguistic communities are largely formed through three interrelated historical processes of continental colonialism, settler colonialism and (im)migration that the Sinophone is not a unifying category but a heterogeneous formation calibrated by the time and place specificities of each practice and articulation.]

—–. “Racializing area studies, defetishizing China.” positions 27, 1 (2019): 33–65.

—–. “Comparison as Relation: From World History to World Literature.” In Kuei-fen Chiu and Yingjin Zhang, eds., The Making of Chinese-Sinophone Literatures as World Literature. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2022, 63-81.

Shih, Shu-mei, Chien-hsin Tsai, and Brian Bernards, eds., Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.

[Abstract: This definitive anthology casts Sinophone studies as the study of Sinitic-language cultures born of colonial and postcolonial influences. Essays by such authors as Rey Chow, Ha Jin, Leo Ou-fan Lee, Ien Ang, Wei-ming Tu, and David Wang address debates concerning the nature of Chineseness while introducing readers to essential readings in Tibetan, Malaysian, Taiwanese, French, Caribbean, and American Sinophone literatures. By placing Sinophone cultures at the crossroads of multiple empires, this anthology richly demonstrates the transformative power of multiculturalism and multilingualism, and by examining the place-based cultural and social practices of Sinitic-language communities in their historical contexts beyond ¡§China proper,¡¨ it effectively refutes the diasporic framework. It is an invaluable companion for courses in Asian, postcolonial, empire, and ethnic studies, as well as world and comparative literature.]

Song, Mingwei. “The Worlding of Chinese Science Fiction: A Global Genre and Its Negotiations as World Literature.” In Kuei-fen Chiu and Yingjin Zhang, eds., The Making of Chinese-Sinophone Literatures as World Literature. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2022, 122-43.

Stalling, Jonathan. “A Decade Apart: Bridging the US and China Literary Systems, 2010-2021.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed., A World History of Chinese Literature. New York: Routledge, 2023, 74-84.

Tan, E. K. Rethinking Chineseness: Translational Sinophone Identities in the Nanyang Literary World. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2013. [MCLC Resource Center review by Karen Thornber]

[Abstracts: This book examines the relationship between the Nanyang Chinese, their original homelands (Borneo, Malaysia and Singapore) and their imaginary homeland (China) through the works of writers such as Kuo Pao Kun, Chang Kuei-hsing, and Vyvyane Loh. The increasing international scholarly interest in works by these individuals–part of an ever-growing Sinophone canon–draws critical attention to the politics of identity formation and transnational discourses of ethnicity and identity. Although these works and concomitant discourses have generated a great deal of interest in Asia, they remain largely unexplored in English-language scholarship. While many scholars have contributed to the field, there is still a great disparity between both the primary and secondary literature written in Chinese and English. To expand the scope of discussion on Sinophone studies with a focus on the Nanyang Chinese, Rethinking Chineseness creates a dialogue by breaking down the linguistic boundaries between these critical discourses. In recent years, scholars in anthropology, cultural studies, literature, and sociology have critically examined Sinophone communities as part of Chinese diaspora and Chinese overseas studies. Focusing on the triangular relationship among globalization, transnationalism and diaspora studies, these scholars tend to assume that Sinophone experiences are similar across culture, history, ethnicity and gender, neglecting the uniqueness of individual Sinophone communities. Rethinking Chineseness addresses this oversight by adopting the Sinophone as a critical concept to investigate the unique experience of the Nanyang Chinese within the context of literary studies. The concept of Chineseness has arisen as a topic widely discussed and debated among scholars for the past two decades. As a project that takes as its objective a rethinking of the meaning of Chineseness in the context of the Nanyang Chinese, Rethinking Chineseness addresses Chineseness as a theme that poses a problem to scholars involved in Ethnic and Area studies via the critical concept of the Sinophone. The investigation of the productivity of the Sinophone in evaluating the notion of Chineseness is to foreground the significance of the Nanyang Chinese writers and their works within the larger scope of representation in the global cultural experience of Sinophone communities. As cultural products, their works directly and also symptomatically tackle questions relating to Sinophone identities in a less metaphysical but phenomenological sense.]

Tang, Fang. Literary Fantasy in Contemporary Chinese Diasporic Women’s Literature: Imagining Home. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2019.

[Abstract: This book explores the use of literary fantasy in the construction of identity and ‘home’ in contemporary diasporic Chinese women’s literature. It argues that the use of fantasy acts as a way of undermining the power of patriarchy and unsettling fixed notions of home. The idea of home explored in this book relates to complicated struggles to gain a sense of belonging, as experienced by marginalized subjects in constructing their diasporic identities — which can best be understood as unstable, shifting, and shaped by historical conditions and power relations.]

Teng, Emma J. “What’s ‘Chinese’ in Chinese Diasporic Literature?” I n Charles Laughlin ed., Contested Modernities in Chinese Literature. NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005, 61-79.

—–. Eurasian: Mixed Identities in the United States, China and Hong Kong, 1842-1943. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. [MCLC Resource Center review by Beth Lew-Williams]

Tong, Tee Kim. “The Position of Sinophone Malaysian Literature within the Polysystem of Taiwan Literature.” In Chin-Chuan Cheng, I-Chun Wang, and Steven Totosy de Zepetnek, eds. Cultural Discourse in Taiwan. Kaohsiung: Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences, National Sun Yat-sen University, 2009, 108-22.

—–. “(Re)mapping Sinophone Literature.” In Jing Tsu and David Der-wei Wang, eds., Global Chinese Literature: Critical Essays. Leiden: Brill, 2010, 77-92.

Tsu, Jing. Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011. [MCLC Resource Center review by Andrea Bachner]

[Abstract: What happens when language wars are not about hurling insults or quibbling over meanings, but are waged in the physical sounds and shapes of language itself? Native and foreign speakers, mother tongues and national languages, have jostled for distinction throughout the modern period. The fight for global dominance between the English and Chinese languages opens into historical battles over the control of the medium through standardization, technology, bilingualism, pronunciation, and literature in the Sinophone world. Encounters between global languages, as well as the internal tensions between Mandarin and other Chinese dialects, present a dynamic, interconnected picture of languages on the move. … Jing Tsu explores the new global language trade, arguing that it aims at more sophisticated ways of exerting influence besides simply wielding knuckles of power. Through an analysis of the different relationships between language standardization, technologies of writing, and modern Chinese literature around the world from the nineteenth century to the present, this study transforms how we understand the power of language in migration and how that is changing the terms of cultural dominance. Drawing from an unusual array of archival sources, this study cuts across the usual China-West divide and puts its finger on the pulse of a pending supranational world under “literary governance.”]

—–. “Sinophonics and the Nationalization of Chinese.” In Jing Tsu and David Der-wei Wang, eds., Global Chinese Literature: Critical Essays. Leiden: Brill, 2010, 93-114.

—–. “1957, June 7: Sino-Muslims and China’s Latin New Script: A Reunion between Diaspora and Nationalism.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 613-19.

Tsu, Jing and David Der-wei Wang, eds. Global Chinese Literature: Critical Essays. Leiden: Brill, 2010.

—–. “Introduction: Global Chinese Literature.” In Jing Tsu and David Der-wei Wang, eds., Global Chinese Literature: Critical Essays. Leiden: Brill, 2010, 1-14.

Van Crevel, Maghiel. Language Shattered: Contemporary Chinese Poetry and Duoduo. Leiden: CNWS, 1996, 221-234.

—–. “Exile: Yang Lian, Wang Jiaxin and Bei Dao.” In van Crevel, Chinese Poetry in Times of Mind, Mayhem and Money. Leiden: Brill, 2008: 137-186.

Volland, Nicolai. “In Search of the City of Light: Chinese Creative Communities and the Myth of Interwar Paris.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 31, 1  (Spring 2019): 192-228.

—–. “Fluid Horizons: Oceanic Epistemologies and Sinophone Literature.” Prism 19, 2 (2022): 337-54.

[Abstract: This article revisits Sinophone literature from the archipelagic region of the western Pacific to understand how thinking with and through the ocean shapes patterns of place-making and identity formation. Scrutinizing stories by Syaman Rapongan and Ng Kim Chew, the article shows how the ocean figures on several distinct registers: as the locale where these works unfold, as the object toward which their characters’ yearnings and reflections are directed, and as a condition of being. Alternatively, the ocean can be read in the metaphorical and allegorical sense, as a device that allows their authors to critique (neo)colonial violence, the irruption of modernity, and especially the rigors of land-based and supposedly stable epistemologies. Against these, Rapongan and Ng posit what I call oceanic epistemologies, that is, systems and methods of knowledge drawn from and intertwined with the ocean as a condition of being on a terraqueous globe. The oceanic epistemologies in Sinophone literatures from littoral East and Southeast Asia allow us to rethink fundamental questions of being, identity, and history. They build upon, but methodologically move beyond, the critical apparatus offered by Sinophone literature.]

Wan, Zhi, ed. Breaking the Barriers: Chinese Literature Facing the World. Trs. Chen Maiping, Anna Gustafsson, and Simon Patton. Stockholm: Olof Palme International Center, 1997. [contributions by Wan Zhi, Duoduo, Yan Li, Yang Lian, Yo Yo, Gao Xingjian, Zhao Yiheng, and others]

Wang, Ban. “Ecological Critique as World Literature: Alienation of Nature and Humans in Chen Qiufan’s Waste Tide.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed., A World History of Chinese Literature. New York: Routledge, 2023, 207-18.

Wang, David Der-wei 王德威. “Sinophone Studies and Taiwan Perspectives” (華語語系: 台灣觀點). Chung Wai Literary Quarterly 44, 1 (2015): 131–134.

—–. “Introduction: Worlding Literary China.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 1-28.

—–. “Of Wind, Soil, and Water: On the Mesology of Sinophone/Xenophone Southeast Asian Literature.” Prism 19, 2 (2022): 283-300.

[Abstract: This essay seeks to reconsider the current paradigm of Sinophone studies, which is largely based on theories from postcolonialism to empire critique. While Sinophone studies derives its critical thrust from confronting China as a hegemonic force, some approaches have taken a path verging on Sinophobia, the reverse of Sinocentrism. Implied in the argument is a dualistic mapping of geopolitics such as assimilation versus diaspora, resistance versus hegemony, theory versus history, and Sinophone relationality versus China.]

—–. “Sinophone States of Exception.” In Andrea Bachner, Howard Chiang, and Yu-lin Lee, eds., Sinoglossia. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2023, 201-11.

Wang, Chih-ming. “Bidding Farewell with Regret: Notes towards Affective Articulations and Inter-Asian Writing.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 7, 2 (2013): 214-34.

[Abstract: This paper proposes an alternative approach to the contemporary discussion of Asia, or more specifically East Asia. Rather than conceptualizing Asia as a geo-economic entity, as a cultural historical construct of Euro-centrism, and as a capitalist vision of the world market, this paper seeks to recapture “Asia” in what I call “affective articulations.” Specifically, I will examine Dazai Osamu’s Farewell with Regret (Sekibetsu, 1945) and Zhang Chengzhi’s Respect and Farewell with Regret (Jingzhong yu xibie, 2008) as two exemplars of inter-Asian writing in which Asia is represented as a loaded symbol of affect. Whereas Dazai’s book was written in the heat of Great East Asia War, to comply with the demands of the Japanese war effort, Zhang’s book was written at the no less challenging time of China’s rise to regional hegemony. Though they differ in style and purpose, both texts hold up a vision of Asia which is distinctly grasped in affective encounters, symbolized by the act of “bidding farewell with regret” (xibie). Intrigued by the affective significance of bidding farewell with regret, this paper first considers “farewell” as a method to recast the discussion of Asia in regional and geopolitical terms, and then performs an analysis of the texts in question so as to identify crucial moments when Asia, despite its internal heterogeneity and complicated history, is grasped in the affective articulation of Sino-Japanese encounters. Such moments, I believe, are real, sincere, and indispensable for our attempt to re-imagine Asia as a translocal solidarity.]

Wong, Andrew D. Hsi-Yao Su, and Mei Hiramoto. “Complicating Raciolinguistics: Language, Chineseness, and the Sinophone.” Language and Communication 76 (2021): 131-35.

Wong, Lisa Lai-ming. Framings of Cultural Identities: Modern Poetry in Post-Colonial Taiwan with Yang Mu As a Case Study. PhD thesis. HK: Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 1999.

—–. “Writing Allegory: Diasporic Consciousness as a Mode of Intervention in Yang Mu’s Poetry of the 1970s.” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 5, 1 (2001): 1-28.

Wong, Nicholas Y. H. “Inter-imperial, Ecological Interpretations of the ‘Five Coolies’ Myth in Penang and Medan.” Prism 19, 2 (2022): 319-36.

[Abstract: This article proposes resource extraction politics as a lens to analyze the relationship between Malaysian Chinese (or Mahua) literature and the global literary economy. Rather than ascribe Mahua literature to its present national boundaries and diasporic communities, the article locates its formation in inter-imperial nodes of trafficked labor and art production, as well as a global system of colonial plantations. The article revisits Zeng Huading’s 曾華丁 (1906–1942) short story (1928) and Ba Ren’s 巴人 (1901–1972) historical drama (1949) about the myth of five Chinese coolies and their execution in 1871 for murdering a Dutch foreman in a Deli tobacco plantation in East Sumatra. The Anglo-Dutch migration corridor, or the cross-straits coolie trade between the two imperial jurisdictions of Penang (Straits Settlements) and Medan (East Sumatra), now part of Malaysia and Indonesia respectively, was one Nanyang connection, but these writers have been discussed separately within Mahua and Yinhua 印華 (Indonesian Chinese) contexts. Ba Ren, in particular, is studied as a leftist writer who contributed artistically to the Indonesian and Chinese revolutions in the 1940s and 1950s. Here, the article rethinks Ba Ren’s legacy within a Mahua corpus, and Zeng Huading’s fiction within a cross-straits history of labor. This ecological reading of their works also highlights their critique of Mahua’s peripheralization within a world economy and global literature.]

Wong, Sau-ling C. “Global Vision and Locatedness: World Literature in Chinese/by Chinese from a Chinese-American Perspective.” In Jing Tsu and David Der-wei Wang, eds., Global Chinese Literature: Critical Essays. Leiden: Brill, 2010, 49-76.

Wong, Yoon Wah. Post-Colonial Chinese Literatures in Singapore and Malaysia. Singapore: Department of Chinese Studies, National University of Singapore / River Edge, NJ: Global Publishing, 2002.

Wu, Andrea Mei-Ying. “Taiwanese Picturebooks and Children’s Literature as World Literature.” In Kuei-fen Chiu and Yingjin Zhang, eds., The Making of Chinese-Sinophone Literatures as World Literature. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2022, 186-201.

Yang, Bin. “Under and Beyond the Pen of Eileen Chang: Shanghai, Nanyang, Huaqiao, and Greater China.” Frontiers of History in China 11, 3 (2016): 458-484.

Yang, Lian. “In Search of Poetry as the Prototype of Exile.” Tr. Torbjörn Lodén. 00tal # 9/10 (2002): 35-41.

Yao, Steven G. Foreign Accents: Chinese American Verse from Exclusion to Postethnicity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. [MCLC Resource Center Review by Dian Li]

—–. “1970: The Angel Island Poems: Chinese Verse in the Modern Diaspora.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 691-97.

Zhang, Longxi. “Chinese Literature, Translation, and World Literature.” In Kuei-fen Chiu and Yingjin Zhang, eds., The Making of Chinese-Sinophone Literatures as World Literature. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2022, 25-39.

Zhang, Longxi and Sheldon Lu, eds. “Comparative Literature and China: Methods and Perspectives,” special issue of Journal of World Literature 9, 2 (May 2024).

Zhang, Yingjin. “Locations of China in World Literature and World Cineam.” In Kuei-fen Chiu and Yingjin Zhang, eds., The Making of Chinese-Sinophone Literatures as World Literature. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2022, 40-62.

Zhang, Zao. Auf die Suche nach poetischer Modernität: Die neue Lyrik Chinas nach 1919 (The Search for Poetic Modernity: China’s New Poetry after 1919). PhD thesis. Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen, 2004. [ch 7, “Bei Dao und das Exil der Wörter” (Bei Dao and the Exile of Words) is on exile].

Zhang, Zhen. “The Jet Lag of a Migratory Bird: Border Crossings toward/from ‘The Land That Is Not’.” In Sharon K Hom ed., Chinese Women Traversing Diaspora: Memoirs, Essays, and Poetry. New York and London: Garland, 1999, 51-75.

Zheng Yi, Su Wei, Wan Zhi, Huang Heqing, eds. Busi liuwangzhe (The undying exile). Taibei: INK, 2005.

Zhou, Gang. Placing the Modern Chinese Vernacular in Transnational Literature. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. [MCLC Resource Center review by Jon Eugene von Kowallis]

[Abstract: This is the first book to concentrate not only on the triumph of the vernacular in modern China but also on the critical role of the rise of the vernacular in world literature, invoking parallel cases from countries throughout Europe and Asia. Contents: Introduction; The Language of Utopia; The Chinese Renaissance; The Shaky House; ‘The Vernacular Only’ Writing Mode; Epilogue]