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. 

 

《台灣新世代女性小説》這一專輯，我們特地請台灣清華大學台灣文學研究所李癸雲教授擔任客座編輯，負責選稿。因受篇幅的限制，只選11位女性小説家的短篇小説12篇，作者都是1970年以後出生、其作品發表於2000年以後，反映出二十一世紀台灣社會的變動現象和新世代的精神樣貌。

同時我們請李教授撰寫一篇導輪，題爲〈創傷．情慾．時代女聲〉，除了簡述11位作家及其作品之外，還勾勒出其中「隱隱浮現某些書寫特徵，關於內在創傷、女性意識、身體情慾、人與貓的互喻、日常生活等」。

本輯導論〈創傷．情慾．時代女聲〉中所特別强調的是，這些作品所書寫的情慾、流露出女性意識底層所隱含的個人私密經驗的内在創傷，而正視創傷，「藉此梳理出形貌清晰的女性肌理，迴盪出『時代女聲』的特殊音色」，成爲新世代台灣女性小説的一大特徵。

 

 

Kuo-ch'ing Tu, born in Taichung, Taiwan. His research interests include Chinese literature, Chinese poetics and literary theories, comparative literature East and West, and world literatures of Chinese (Shi-Hua wenxue). He is the author of numerous books of poetry in Chinese, as well as translator of English, Japanese, and French works into Chinese.

 

 

Terence Russell is Senior Scholar in the Asian Studies Center at the University of Manitoba. He has an interest in contemporary literature in Chinese, especially the literature of Taiwan's Indigenous people. Dr. Russell has been a regular contributor to Taiwan Literature: English Translation Series, and was the guest editor of Issue 24 on Taiwan Indigenous myths and oral literature.

 

Lee Kuei Yun

Lee Kuei Yun is currently a professor in the Institute of Taiwan Literature at National Tsing Hua University and the vice-chairman of the Taiwan Literature Society. She is the author of academic treatises such as Poetry and Its Symbols, Between Structure and Symbols, Misty: Qingming and Flow, and Dialogue with Poetry, as well as a collection of poems called Woman’s Flow. She has won the Taipei Literature Award New Poetry Jury Award, Taichung County Literature Award New Poetry Award, Nanying Literature Award “Nanying New Talent Award,” Taiwan Literature Award Prose Award, and the Tsinghua University Outstanding Teaching Award, etc.

 

John Balcom is Professor Emeritus at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. His most recent translation is The All-Seeing Eye: Collected Poems by Shang Qin, published by Cambria Press.

 

 

Yingtsih Hwang is a poetry blogger and independent translatorbased in Monterey, California.

 

 

Karmia Chan Olutade is a Chinese Canadian literary translator and creative and localization specialist in the education-technology industry. She graduated with a BA in English Literature and Creative Writing from Stanford University, where she studied under poets Eavan Boland and Nobel laureate Louise Gluck. Olutade served as a managing editor of Pathlight Magazine (People’s Literature Publishing), and has published multiple volumes of original and poetry in translation through Foreign Language Press, Guomai, Shanghai Literature, among others. She resides with her family in Southern California.

 

 

Aoife Cantrill is a third year PhD student at the University of Oxford. Her doctoral thesis explores the role of translators in shaping narratives of Japanese colonial rule in Taiwan through the translation of women’s fiction and literary essays. Outside her doctoral work, she has recently published on the role of paratext in Yan Lianke’s fiction.

 

 

Erin Y. Huang is an assistant professor of East Asian Studies and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. She is an interdisciplinary scholar and comparatist specializing in critical theory, Marxist geography, postcolonial studies, feminist theory, cinema and media studies, and Sinophone Asia. She is the author of Urban Horror: Neoliberal Post-Socialism and the Limits of Visibility (Duke University Press, 2020). Her second book project, Islands of Capital: The Aesthetic Life of Zones in Sino-Capitalism, introduces an archipelagic and oceanic approach to continental China that considers the technologies of the ocean, zoning and artificial islanding, and infrastructural expansion from the twentieth century to the present.

 

 

Billy Beswick is a doctoral student in Chinese culture studies at the University of Oxford. In his research, he uses analyses of film,art, and literature to think about the way national-boundaries are drawn through figurations of “internal” ethnic difference in Taiwan and mainland China, and how this in turn affects minority and indigenous self-representation.

 

 

Hu Ying is Professor of modern Chinese literature at UC Irvine.Her publications include Tales of Translation: Composing the New Woman in China (Stanford, 2000), Burying Autumn: Poetry, Friendship and Loss (Harvard, 2015), and Beyond Exemplar Tales: Women’s Biography in Chinese History (co-edited, UC Press, 2006). She enjoys translating fiction and has tried her hand at prose, poetry,and plays as well. Her recent translation forays include works by Lu Xun, Xue Yiwei, and Wang Anyi.