Literary Culture in Taiwan: Martial Law to Market Law

Adopting Peter Bürger's notion of the "institution of literature" and Pierre Bourdieu's theory of the field of cultural production as its conceptual framework, this book explores the opposition and entanglement of conflicting "principles of legitimacy," driven by political and market factors, respectively, within contemporary Taiwan's literary production. The book is divided into three main parts: the first part introduces broader issues and historical context; the second part focuses on three literary formations: the mainstream, the modernist, and the localist; the third part deals with the significant transformations the mainstream literary position underwent from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, as well as the landscape of the literary field in the early post-martial law era.

The introduction and the first two chapters outline the academic context and conceptual framework, as well as the interaction between political and market factors in the literary field of Taiwan. The third chapter describes the correspondence between the "soft authoritarian rule" during martial law and the "mainstream position" in the literary field and the resulting "dominant aesthetic categories." Chapters four and five deal with the advent of a West-imported aesthetic ideology, modernism, in the late 1950s and the emergence of a localist literary formation fraught with tension vis-à-vis mainstream literature. Chapter six examines the literary ecology shaped by the cultural institution "literary supplements to newspapers," or fukan, which has long dominated the production and consecration of Taiwanese literature and the flourishing of middle-class literary genres during the 1970s and 1980s. Chapter seven delves into individual authors and works to exemplify the various directions of metamorphoses experienced by mainstream fiction during this period. Finally, chapter eight, serving as the book's conclusion, briefly outlines several emerging trends after the lifting of martial law: the reconstitution of localist discourse, the rapid ascendance of a postmodern-progressivist-activist intellectual ethos, and creative writers' proactive adaptation to market logic.