Taiwan Literature: English Translation Series, No. 51 (Special Issue on An Outline History of Taiwan Literature)

【About the Editors】

Terence Russell (b. 1950) received his PhD in Classical Chinese from Australian National University in 1984. He is Senior Scholar in the Asian Studies Centre at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. His early research interest was in medieval Taoist literature, but for the past twenty years he has focused on contemporary Taiwan literature, publishing numerous translations and studies, including a rendering of the full-length novel The Soul of Jade Mountain by Indigenous author Husluman Vava (Cambria, 2020). Since 2014, he has been English language editor of Taiwan Literature: English Translation Series.


【About the Translators】

Robert Backus (1928-2014) was Professor of Japanese in the East Asian Languages Department at the University of Santa Barbara. He received his PhD in Japanese from UC Berkeley in 1963, with a dissertation on the mid-Edo-period daimyo, Matsudaira Sadanobu (1759-1829). He joined the faculty at UC Santa Barbara in 1966 and taught until his retirement in 1992. His area of research was Japanese intellectual history, and his principal areas of interest were Edo-period Confucianism and the classical fiction of the Heian period. His collection of translations of Heian-period short stories entitled The Riverside Counselor’s Stories: Vernacular Fiction of Late Heian Japan was published by Stanford University in 1985. With the founding of Taiwan Literature: English Translation Series in 1996, Prof. Backus was charged with the English editing of the journal. For eighteen years he and Prof. Kuo-ch’ing Tu worked on the biannual journal, until he passed away in 2014.

Kuo-ch’ing Tu (b. 1941), graduated from National Taiwan University (1963) with a major in English literature. He received his MA in Japanese literature from Kwansei Gakuin University (1970) and his PhD in Chinese literature from Stanford University (1974). His research interests include Chinese literature, Chinese poetics and literary theories, comparative literature East and West, and world literatures of Chinese. He is the author of numerous books of poetry in Chinese, as well as translator of Baudelaire and T. S. Eliot into Chinese. He held the Lai Ho and Wu Cho-liu Endowed Chair in Taiwan Studies and was the Director of the Center for Taiwan Studies at the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies, University of California at Santa Barbara, until he retired in March 2021. He has been co-editor of Taiwan Literature: English Translation Series since its initial publication in 1996. His recent publications include Shanhe lüeying [A Sweeping View of China’s Mountains and Rivers], Yuyan ji [The Jade Smoke Collection: Fifty Variations on Li Shangyin’s Songs of the Ornamented Zither], Shilun, shiping, shilunshi [Poetics, Poetic Critiques, and Poems of Poetics], and Taiwan wenxue yu Shi-Hua wenxue [Taiwan Literature and World Literatures of Chinese], Guang she chenfang yuanzhao wanxiang [Light Shines Through the World of Dust, Illuminating the Myriad Objects], and Tui chuang wang yue [Pushing Open the Window, Gazing at the Moon: Collected Essays by Tu Kuo-ch’ing].

Editor's Foreword to An Outline History of Taiwan Literature / Kuo-ch'ing Tu
《台灣文學史綱》英譯本前言╱杜國清

Editorial Notes

From “Regionalism” to “Nativism”: An Introduction to the English Translation of Yeh Shih-t'ao's Taiwan Wenxue Shigang (An Outline History of Taiwan Literature) / Kuo-ch'ing Tu

An Outline History of Taiwan Literature
Yeh Shih-t'ao's Original Preface
Chapter One　Transplantation of the Old Traditional Literature
Chapter Two　The Advent of the New Taiwan Literature Movement
Chapter Three　Taiwan Literature in the 1940s: Those Who Sowed with Tears Shall Reap with Shouts of Joy!
Chapter Four　Taiwan Literature of the 1950s: The Frustrations and the Decline of Idealism
Chapter Five　Taiwan Literature of the 1960s: Rootlessness and Exile
Chapter Six　Taiwan Literature in the 1970s: Regionalism or Human Nature?
Chapter Seven　Taiwan Literature in the 1980s: Toward a Freer, and More Tolerant, More Diverse Society
Notes
Index

About the Translators
About the Editor
About the Commentator