ABSTRACT
Whereas most literary practices in Taiwan until the 1920s carried on the classical Chinese tradition, a new strand of modern Taiwanese literature emerged in the early 1920s in a process commonly referred to as the Taiwanese New Literature movement (T’ai-wan hsin wen-hsueh yun-tung). 1 Compared to its counterpart, Modern (vernacular) Chinese Literature, Taiwanese New Literature displayed two distinctive features that seem to universally characterize colonial cultural products: multilinguisity and political impact. In addition to works in Chinese, many of the literary products of this movement—especially in the later stage—were written in Japanese. There was also a viable Taiwanese language movement (T’ai-wan hua-wen yun-tung) in the early 1930s, advocating the use of a new written language based on spoken Taiwanese, which is a version of the southern Min dialect used by the majority of the population in Taiwan. Moreover, from the beginning, Taiwanese New Literature was an integral part of a new phase of sociopolitical resistance by the Taiwanese people to the Japanese colonial rule. In the 1920s, the Taiwanese intelligentsia, revolving around the Taiwanese Cultural Association (T’ai-wan wen-hua hsieh-hui) (1921–31), launched a large-scale cultural reform program with a political agenda, which replaced the futile and often brutally suppressed armed revolts in the first two decades of the Japanese period. Key figures of the early stage of the movement, such as Lai Ho (1894–1943), frequently regarded as the “father of Taiwanese New Literature,” Chen Hsu-ku (1896–1965), and Ts’ai Ch’iu-t’ung (b. 1900), were also active members of the Cultural Association, participating in its well-known islandwide lecture tours. Unsurprisingly, their literary works contained a strong nationalistic component. Even after 1931, when a harsh crackdown by the colonial government put an end to the lively resistance activities of the previous decade, the New Literature, nourished by the sociopolitical movements of the 1920s, continued to grow among the increasingly bilingual intellectual class in Taiwan. The legacy of resistance to colonialism also persisted, in either overt or covert forms, until the very end of the Japanese period.
