The Soldier-Writer, the Expatriate, and Cold War Modernism in Taiwan
Freedom in the Trenches
Li-Chun Hsiao
The Soldier-Writer, the Expatriate, and Cold War Modernism in Taiwan
Freedom in the Trenches
Li-Chun Hsiao
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Description
The Soldier-Writer, the Expatriate, and Cold War Modernism in Taiwan: Freedom in the Trenches characterizes Taiwan's postwar modernist literature as Cold War modernism par excellence that was born out of a constellation of Cold War circumstances, amounting to a perfect storm for its emergence.
Well researched and documented, this monograph is about Taiwan’s sinophone literary modernism, 1950s–1970s. Hsiao emphasizes poetry and explicates particular literary cliques, journals, and manifestos more than texts. Judging by European modernism’s original socially critical thrust, the author finds Taiwan’s latter-day, politically constrained avant-garde poetry moderationist…. Notable 1950s modernist poets (Luo Fu, Shang Qin, Ya Xian) are characterized as soldier-writers rather than mainlander émigrés: they served in Chiang Kai-shek’s armies…. Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty.
In this seminal study of Taiwan’s literary modernism in the Cold War context,
Li-Chun Hsiao probes into a number of unexamined assumptions about its rise and development and seeks to tease out a cultural politics and poetics of Cold War modernism in Taiwan mainly by addressing the “soldier-poets” and expatriate writers as a crossover point for a number of discursive practices whose origins are elsewhere: of Cold War ideology, US foreign policy, aesthetic doctrines and literary pedagogy, long-distance Chinese nationalism, among others. It is a superb work of scholarship, painstakingly researched, copiously documented, and gracefully written.
Drawing on a wealth of recent Chinese-language scholarship on the subject produced in Taiwan, this book would make valuable and unique contributions to the studies of postwar Taiwan literature and culture in the transnational English-speaking academic world. In addition, Li-Chun Hsiao’s insightful account of the slate wiped clean by the Cold War contexts, on which Taiwan’s modernist literature thrived, and his unpacking of the contradictory inclinations of the modernist movement in Taiwan—e.g. its reformist practices and traditionalist undercurrents—may also shed light on the studies of modernism in general, whose varied, even conflicting manifestations in earlier periods and different sites parallel its fraught and malleable definitions.
Li-Chun Hsiao is professor at Waseda University in Tokyo.