Taiwan Literature: English Translation Series, No. 50: Special Issue on Taiwan Fiction and ‘Realism’

During the early stages of its development, Taiwan’s New Literature was intimately connected with realism.
The year 2022 is the one-hundredth anniversary of fiction writing in Taiwan, and also the one-hundredth anniversary of modernist literature in the English-speaking world. For the former, this is the one-hundredth anniversary of the publication of Chui Feng’s “Where Will She Go?” For the latter, it is the one-hundredth anniversary of the publication of James Joyce’s (1882–1941) novel Ulysses, and Anglo-American writer T. S. Eliot’s (1888–1965) poem The Waste Land. When the Alphabet Lab was first established, it also paid tribute to the contribution of modernism in the development of post-war Taiwan literature. In this special fiftieth issue on “Taiwan Fiction and ‘Realism,’” we once again identify and trace out the pathways and objectives of Taiwan’s writer apostles over the past one-hundred years.

• 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.