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Title |
A Primary Survey of Post-Regional Literature |
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Author |
Fan, Ming-Ju |
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Professor, Graduate Institute of Taiwanese Literature, National Chengchi University |
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Abstract |
Since the mid-1990s, the number of fiction with Taiwanese regional landscape and rural custom has been increasing. Obviously, the literary trend has been shifting from the descriptive and experimental fiction centering on modernity and metropolitan culture in the 1980s and 1990s to the genre of regional literature. We can almost smell the ripeness of this first type of Taiwanese literature in the new era. I use the term “post-regional literature” to define those texts. Although the grant narrative of nativization promoted by the national and local bureaus serves as the hotbed for post-regional literature, the transformation of aesthetics and culture that combines the discourses on globalization has, to a certain degree, changed the pre-determined aims of the former. The significance of the country represented by the texts has also changed. The visions of the countryside have been multiplying, interchanging and mutating at a constant rate to become unprecedentedly rich and prosperous. At the same time, this literature also faces underlying concerns about questions, contradictions or disintegration amid such excessive expansion. This paper explores the paradox between post-regional literature and the contemporary cultural discourse in Taiwan. I am going to reveal that it is not a return to the past or a nostalgic yearning to resume humanistic traditions. Rather, these texts are the product of a reorganization that sums up Taiwan’s structural adjustments in politics, society, culture and ecology and the impact of globalization outside Taiwan. |
