Modern And Contemporary Chinese Literature

New-Localness is a concept proposed by the Taiwanese academia at the beginning of the new millennium.The study of the literary phenomena in relation to this concept has not last long and is still at the preliminary stage.The definition and elaboration of new-localness are still controversial and remain open for criticism.This dissertation employs the term new local novels to refer to a class of novels characterized by using local subjects written in the period from the early 1990s to the present.The writers belong to the old,the middle-aged and the young generations,with most of them relatively young.Within a cultural context of globalization,modernization and localization,their creation of new local novels not only inherits some traits of traditional local literature but also surpasses or even subverts some.The localness reflected in their works appears to be multidimensional.It includes their concern about and reflection upon the vicissitudes of time and local reality,the inspection and retrospection of the history of the island,and the in-depth exploration of their spiritual world and existing predicament.Their literary ideology and aesthetics responded to the uproarious talks and diverse modes of creation in the post-1980s literary circle.Their projection of self and reality soaked with contemporary consciousness,their modernistic and individualized construction and imagination of localness,and their marking of the literary identity with local symbols by employing different postmodern writing techniques all displayed the alteration of local consciousness and spirits during the past thirty years.The two debates over local literature in the 1930s and 1970s provide the source of discourse and theoretical support for the formation of localness and related concepts,clarify the historical situation of localness within the field of Taiwan literature,and propel directly or indirectly the transformation of literary ecology,influence the literary creation of that time and later ages,and provide a historical route for the emergence of localness.The formation of new-localness is not only restricted by the entire cultural context,but also subject to the mechanism of cultural production and literary ecology.It is grounded on a new social and cultural soil.Therefore,the standpoint they adhered to,and the literary meaning and value orientation they presented were divergent from earlier generations of writers,conducive to the extending of the intension and extension of local literature to a certain extent.The strengthening of locality,local production and identity construction extended from local writing constitutes the response to localized cultural context.The ecological consciousness in new local novels and the ethnic groups within the scope of attention,and the concern over local women’s destiny and even feminist consciousness incited by the local writing of female writers all manifested the extension of local imagination.The avant garde historical narration in the local writings published during the past three decades reflected the modernistic introvert writing and the focus on people’s spiritual predicament after the local ethic metamorphosis,which is doubtlessly the extension of local spirit.An overall investigation of the constancy and inconstancy of new-local novels can not only capture the current trend of local literature and the breakthrough and predicament of the literary creation of the young writers,but also examine the radical change of literary ecology in the highly capitalized,urbanized and consumerized social environment in Taiwan.