1st Edition

Identity, Multiplicity, and Resistance in Taiwanese Poetry

Edited By Wen-chi Li Copyright 2025
236 Pages 13 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

236 Pages 13 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

236 Pages 13 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

Li and his contributors explore how Taiwanese poets conceptualize their identities, employing multiple voices to challenge political hegemony and re-evaluate Taiwan’s colonial legacy and nationalism. Poetry in Taiwan exists at the intersection of Taiwanese, Mandarin, and Japanese languages and traditions. The rise of China has contributed to the shrinking of Taiwan’s international space,... Read more

Introduction, Wen-chi Li Part I: Transcultural Intertextuality 1. On the Margins of Empire and the Frontier of Aesthetics: The Local and Global Significance of Le Moulin Poetry Society, Yun-yuan Chen and Trans. Francesca Jordan 2. Colonial Compromises: Lung Ying-tsung’s Quest for Taiwanese Literary Expression in Japanese, Dean Anthony Brink 3. Horizontal Transplantation or Vertical Inheritance: Modernism and Debates in 1950s Taiwan, Rosa Lombardi Part II: Localization at Crossroads 4. Return to Reality: The 1970s Modern Poetry and Nativist Literature Debates, Shu-wei Tu 5. The Struggle of the Local: The Rise of Dialect Poetry in Taiwan, John Balcom 6. Has Spring Returned to the “Mountains of Lost Youth”? Indigenous Poetry, Shu-ming Tung and Trans. Francesca Jordan 7. Negotiating Chineseness and Re-positioning Selfhood: Malaysian and Hong Kong Poets in Taiwan, Pei-yin Lin Part III: Transformative Voices 8. Form = Content? Semiotic Convergence and Divergence in Concrete Poetry, Elaine Wong 9. Two Poets Take a Stand: Wu Sheng, Hung Hung, and Political Poetry in Contemporary Taiwan, Brian Skerratt 10. Embodied Poetics: Contemporary Taiwanese Women’s Poetry, Lin-chin Tsai 11. The Difficulty of Writing: Queer Temporality, Affect, and Historicity in Poetry, Wen-chi Li 12. Social Media and Democracy: Poets in the Millennium, Yi-wei Lai

Biography

Wen-chi Li holds a post as the Swiss National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Mobility Fellow at the University of Oxford, after completing Susan Manning Fellow at the University of Edinburgh and receiving his PhD in Sinology from the University of Zurich. He has co-edited the Chinese book Under the Same Roof: A Poetry Anthology for LGBTQ+ (Dark Eyes, 2019) and the volume of Taiwanese Literature as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2022). As a translator, he co-translated Decapitated Poetry by Ko-hua Chen (Seagull Books, 2023), which won the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize.