Writing the past: Rereading, recovering, and rethinking history in contemporary literature from Taiwan

From 1949 to 1987, the government of the Nationalist or Kuomintang (KMT) Party held dominant political control in Taiwan. During much of that period, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, the KMT attempted to establish policy for creative writing that served their political interests. By setting up semi-official literary organizations, controlling major publishing venues including many newspapers and periodicals, and by issuing policy directives that called for anticommunist works, the Nationalists sought to set the course for new creative writing. They discouraged frank analyses of history from the same period and suppressed discussion of campaigns of political repression they had waged against the native Taiwanese populations and politically progressive movements that supported socialism and communism.; This dissertation explores how creative writers from Taiwan including the authors Pai Hsien-yung, Ch'en Ying-Chen, and Wang Wen-hsing, the poet and essayist Ya Hsien and filmmakers Stan Lai and Hou Hsiao-hsien have attempted to reappropriate prohibited or repressed accounts of pre-1949 Chinese history and socialist and communist movements in their creative works. It also examines how they have offered a critique of the Nationalist government's military establishment, its aspirations for retaking Chinese territory lost in a civil war with the Chinese Communist Party in 1949, and of the government's promotion of industrialization and economic development.; Following an introduction, I show how Pai Hsien-yung's Taipei jen (Taipei characters) offers a thinly veiled critique of pre-1949 Nationalist history and of the KMT's calls for recovering Mainland China. I next investigate how Wang Wen-hsing's "Lung-t'ien lou" (Dragon inn) uses self-conscious references to its own fictionality and filmic techniques to satire the anticommunist literature promoted by the KMT and to create an alternative history of the Nationalist defeat in the Chinese Civil War. A reading of Ya Hsien's poetry demonstrates how this poet offers a critique of both the institution of war and the death and suffering it brings as well as notions of progress and industrial development. I conclude by discussing how Ch'en Ying-chen offers narratives of recovery in three shorts works about the White Terror Period and the suppression of progressive political movements in Taiwan.