Taiwan Literature: English Translation Series, No. 49: Special Issue on New Generation Women's Fiction from Taiwan

For this special issue on “New Generation Women's Fiction from Taiwan,” we have specially invited Professor Lee Kuei Yun of the Graduate Institute of Taiwan Literature at Taiwan's Tsing Hua University to be guest editor and take responsibility for the selections. Because of space limitations it has been possible only to select twelve short stories by eleven woman writers. These writers were all born in the 1970s or later and their works were published in the year 2000 or later. Thus, they represent a period of social change in twenty-first century Taiwan and the spirit of the new generation. The introduction that we asked Professor Lee to provide is entitled “Trauma, esire, Contemporary Women's Voices.” Aside from giving a brief account of the eleven writers and their works, Professor Lee sketches “a number of writerly qualities that become perceptible… [that] represent the internal trauma, female consciousness, physical lust, cat-uman metaphors, and everyday life, etc.” In her introduction, what she particularly stresses is that the sexual desire depicted in these works exposes the internal wounds derived from private individual experience hidden away in the deepest levels of the female consciousness that are exposed for direct observation, and “… [from this] we can tease out a clear semblance of a feminine texture that reverberates with the unique sound of contemporary women's voices.” This then is one of the most important qualities of the new generation of aiwanese women's fiction. In the final analysis, trauma and writing about desire are two major themes of Taiwanese women's literature.

• Kuo-ch'ing Tu, Editor

  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]."

• Terence Russell, Editor

  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.