| In the mid 1960s, a new trend emerged in the Chinese fiction in Taiwan: the major writers turned to depict the contemporary social reality and consciously used fiction as an instrument either to record the local life style and traditional customs or to expose social ills to evoke actions of reform. This trend, usually defined as "social realism" in Taiwan, remained the main stream of Taiwan literature until the end of the 1970s.;In the late 1960s while Taiwan was developing from an agricultural society to an industrial one, most realists tended to play the role of the historian or the anthropologist to truthfully record the social reality. The traditional life style, the local customs, and the attitudes and mood of the Chinese people, especially those in the lower classes in the vanishing agricultural society, became the most popular topics. In the 1970s when the great change was completed, most realists became social critics. They tried to expose the social ills of the industrialized society; among them social inequities, adulation of the West, and the collapse of traditional values received greatest attention.;This realistic movement owes its realistic techniques and theories at least to three traditions: Western literary realism, May Fourth-1930s realism, and traditional Chinese realism.;In addition to an analysis of the themes and realistic techniques of all the major works of the eight most important writers in this movement, this dissertation also attempts to meditate on the limitations and virtues of social realism and trace the factors that caused its rise and fall in Taiwan.;This social realistic movement sprang from the two most deep-rooted aesthetic attitudes in China--that art should be used to improve human life and that literature should be realistic. A similar movement also appeared in the late Ch'ing and the May Fourth-1930s period on the mainland. All these movements, like the realistic movement in European literature in the mid nineteenth century, were also related to the rise of a middle class, the collapse of traditional values, and the prevalence of democratic ideas. |
