Early Taiwanese Literature(Moriah Pleasant) Jasmine help posting

The native peoples settled on the island of Taiwan thousands of years ago and developed distinct oral narratives, languages, customs, and cultures. For centuries, aborigines on Taiwan have been marginalized in the expression of Taiwanese culture.

Since 1980, native scholars have tried to recreate their own past by reexpressing their peoples' oral traditions. A large quantity of oral narratives about creation myths and tribal heroes have been recorded and distributed in the form of parallel texts, in which the original native languages are spelled out in Romanization and accompanied by Chinese translation. The texts are not only intended for Chinese-speaking viewers, but are also primarily used as textbooks for the younger generations in the indigenous population. For many aboriginal scholars, such texts literally constitute the last hope for their traditions to be transmitted in the struggle for cultural survival, fully aware of the brutal fact that even their children are resisting the use of the native tongue. As a result, indigenous languages and literatures are on the verge of disappearance.

Several local Taiwanese poets set in motion to make their names known during the mid-19th century, among them are: Tsai Ting-lan, Chen Chao, Huang Ching, Cheng Yung-hsi, and Lin Chan-mei. They were literati and cultural elites writing in the mode of classical Chinese lyric, and as scholars who played important roles in Taiwan's history, their influence on local culture remains strong. In response to the colonial world of the late Ching period and in reaction to their ancestors, Taiwanese poets of the next two decades became more devoted to everyday subjects and were often committed to expressing nationalist sentiment. Tang Ching-sung ­and Chiu Feng-chia were two prominent officials and poets who got deeply involved in establishing the Democratic Taiwan Nation on May 25, 1895, upon hearing the news that the Ching court had ceded Taiwan to Japan. Other major poets of this generation, such as Chen Wei-ying and Wang Kai-tai, were equally interested in describing ordinary people and popular culture. In many ways, they opened paths toward a more dynamic and democratic era of literary production, the period of Taiwanese literature under Japanese rule (1895-1945).

Taiwanese New Literature

While most literature in Taiwan prior to 1920 was written in the style of the classical Chinese tradition, a new line of modern Taiwanese literature become known in the early 1920s in a process commonly referred to as the Taiwanese New Literature movement. There was also a viable Taiwanese Language movement in the early 1930s, advocating the use of a new written language based on spoken Taiwanese, which is a version of the southern Fujianese language used by the majority of the population in Taiwan.

From the beginning, Taiwanese New Literature was an important part of a new phase of sociopolitical resistance by the Taiwanese people against Japanese colonial rule. In the 1920s, the Taiwanese intelligentsia, revolving around the Taiwanese Cultural Association (1921-1931), launched a large-scale cultural reform program full of various political agendas, in lieu of the futile and often brutally suppressed armed revolts in the first two decades of the Japanese period. Key figures of the early stage of the movement, such as Lai Ho (1894-1943), frequently regarded as the "father of Taiwanese New Literature," Chen Hsu-ku, and Tsai Chiu-tung, were also active members of the Association, participating in its well-known island wide mass education lecture tours. Not surprisingly, nationalistic sentiments were expressed through their literary works. Even after 1931, when a harsh crackdown by the colonial government put an end to the lively resistance activities of the previous decade, the New Literature movement, nourished by the sociopolitical movements of the 1920s, continued to grow among the increasingly bilingual intellectual class of Taiwan. The habit of resistance to colonialism, too, persisted, in either overt or covert forms, until the very end of the Japanese period.