Graduate Institute of Taiwanese Literature, NCCU

Title

“Developmental” narrative of novels during the late Japanese colonial period and meaning of “new-born” characters

Author

Choi, Mal-Soon

Assistant Professor, Graduate Institute of Taiwanese Literature, National Chengchi University

Abstract

While conducting research on the novels during the late Japanese occupation period, it is common that we particularly pay attention to historical changes of the times, such as the process of Japanese militarization and the construction of Fascist system, causing huge impacts on the literature, especially the instance that the consideration of correlation between Kominka Movement and literature from materials and themes. If literature is said to enrich and honestly reflect the history and society, then it will be appropriate to study by reflection of changes of the times.

But observing of existing studies, there are rare treatises that carefully analyze the relation between thought logic of Japanese Fascist and Literary Imagination. The main reason should be that the researchers overemphasized the oppression from Kominka Movement so that imprecisely hold the concrete content of Japanese Fascism aesthetics and thought. The so called literary imagination is generated by contemporary discussion of any domain. Therefore, if it is correctly hold that the actual content of dominant discussion at the time, and how it influence the literature to form special recognition of the time and sensation structure, then relations between the dominant discussion and the literature in multiple level will be known. As a result, internal correlation between temporal situation and literature can be properly inspected.

Having this concept in mind, based on novels in the 40’s the late Japanese colonial period the article focuses on narrative structures and characters and their situation variations, to look for the distinct appearance from the early novels and discover the relation between discussion of control in the late Japanese colonial period. Furthermore, the article discusses Blue Cloud by Lung Ying-Chung and Chen Huo-Chuan Road in view of discussion of technology, which was not been proposed in the academic circle, so that to investigate more carefully about embedded meanings of variation of narrative method and the meaning of new-born characters, looking forward to presenting the contemporary recognition and the reflected image of Taiwan literature during the late Japanese colonial period.