Lin, Pei-yin. Gender and Ethnicity in Taiwanese Literature: Japanese Colonial Era to Present Day [台灣文學中的性別與族裔:從日治到當代]. National Taiwan University Press, 2021.

One of the types of literary criticism I thoroughly enjoy is the one that attends to the ground level of the text, drawing on the seemingly trivial details intratextually, paratextually, and contextually before suggesting any possible interpretation of it or any correspondence between it and ‘grand’ theories. Such a characterisation would suit Pei-yin Lin’s monograph, the twelve main chapters of which (fourteen in total including the “Introduction” and “Conclusion”) always start with abundantly detailed descriptions of the literary texts and their contexts before offering a slice of theory or a nuanced reading perspective at the conclusion section of the chapter. Such a methodology, or narrating strategy, apparently resonates with the author’s concern in this monograph—a feminist perspective on modern Taiwanese literature. Its feminist approach manifests at the level of its critical lens, which largely focuses on literary authors’ deployment of women characters, and also at the level of its interpretation, which carefully ensures the details of the texts would not be reduced to any given theory it proposes to relate. Such a methodology is one great strength of the monograph, and in this sense, offers a moment of reflection on the symbolic dominance of theories over texts.

In several passages, Lin has emphatically explained how certain grand narratives and theoretical frameworks might restrict the texts. For instance, in Chapter Eleven, attending to A Tale of Three Tribes in Dutch Formosa (福爾摩沙三族記 2012) by the relatively less-studied ‘medical doctor writer’ Chen Yao-chang (陳耀昌), Lin judiciously cautions us against a reductive allegorical relation between gender and ethnonationalism (350). In Chapter 7 on Ping Lu (平路) and Li Ang (李昂) as well, Lin shows that while these two women writers’ works are often legible as national allegories (and they themselves more or less claim their works should be read as such), their narratives of romance, marriage, and feminine carnal desire exceed the framework of a national allegorical reading. This emphasis on the independence of gender relation—that cultural or national belonging does not fully explain away an author’s gender politics refracted by her texts or that an author’s gender politics often sits uncomfortably with her cultural and national belonging, and so the two do not smoothly translate each other—is another key takeaway from this monograph. And this nuanced account on the interstices between authors’ gender politics and their possible national allegories could only be developed from a critical orientation towards textual details. The monograph exemplifies how a researcher should allow the texts to show their own complexity and in turn enrich our theoretical imagination. Such orientation towards details suggests the monograph’s feminist position-taking and could be discerned from the literary criticism it draws from, including Naomi Schor’s influential Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (1987) and Rey Chow’s critical Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading Between West and East (which also draws on Schor to explain Eileen Chang’s ornate linguistic styles writing about clothes and everyday details), among the many. It is in this sense that the monograph might be characterised as feminist, though it overall does not aim to offer a militant criticism of gender norms.

Its orientation towards textual details does not mean that it disregards the explanatory power and critical creativity of the theories. Rather, Lin engages with a wide range of theories and critics, offering a capacious repertoire for gender studies, historiography (or metahistory), world literature and translation studies, indigenous studies, island studies, genre studies, and postcolonial studies. This dexterous engagement with wide-ranging approaches allows the text to sufficiently account for its other concern—the representation of ethnicity in modern Taiwanese literature. While its radical focus on details argues the case for the absolute untranslatability of gender relation to other relations, its wide-ranging repertoire allows it to sufficiently situate the texts at the crossroads of Taiwan’s multilayered colonial histories and its liminal, opaque subjectivity. For instance in Chapter One, Lin deals with the knight-errant writings of Xie Xueyu (謝雪漁). As a traditional literatus writing in the Japanese colonial era, Xie deftly mediates the multiple origins of his knight-errant writings—the knight-errant genre from pre-modern Chinese literature, translated world literature, such as that of Victor Hugo, the cultural history of Japan, as well as the turbulent history of East Asia in the early 20th century. Refracted from his writings, Lin shows, is a rather cosmopolitan outlook—multilingual overseas students embody knight-errant virtues and revolutionary idealism. If in Chapter One the meaning of ethnicity takes on a global scale, referring to subjects of incipient modern states in a newly-formed world system seeking glory for their motherlands, in Chapter Ten, it takes on the scale of the Pacific. Dealing with the three autobiographically inflected volumes of fiction by the Tao writer Syaman Rapongan (夏曼．藍波安), Lin painstakingly presents Rapongan’s “poetics of relation” with Polynesian communities. Her argument starts with granular close readings of Rapongan’s corpus, carefully introducing the ‘tragic heroism’ of Rapongan’s many protagonists, and concludes with a humble suggestion for reading Rapongan’s works via the Martinican theorist Édouard Glissant’s Poétique de la Relation (1990). The structure of the argument in this chapter showcases Lin’s respect for authors’ literary universes while also demonstrating her critical intervention by introducing a new framework for a well-studied writer. In Chapter Twelve, the meaning of ethnicity takes on another scale, shifting to that of Southeast Asia. Focusing on Lien Ming-Wei’s (連明偉) Tomato Street and Other War Zones (番茄街游擊戰), Lin reads Lien’s short story collection as an ‘anti-growth’ Bildungsroman, arguing that the stories inscribe the ‘mixed heritage’ of Chinese Filipinos on the bodies of teenaged males whose rites of passage appear stalled. Through the readings of Lien, Rapongan, Xie and more, the meaning of ethnicity in Lin’s monograph shows its slipperiness and openness. As she states in her “Conclusion,” she takes a deconstructionist perspective on ethnicity, which allows her to “pose no assumption concerning Taiwanese literature” (394). The openness of the meaning of ethnicity in this monograph adequately addresses the heterogeneity of modern Taiwanese literature over its multilayered colonial periods and its postcolonial contemporary. Indeed, taking ethnicity as an analytical lens, the monograph shows its ambition to delineate the long chronology of Taiwan’s literary history as early as the Japanese colonial era, and successfully delivers.

To sum up, Lin’s Gender and Ethnicity in Taiwanese Literature: Japanese Colonial Era to Present Day is to be recommended for both novices and experts in Taiwanese literature. The monograph examines Taiwan’s literary works through the lenses of gender and ethnicity, providing nuanced readings for both well-known writers and lesser-known ones (see Chapters Two on A Q zhi di (徐坤泉) and Mansha Wu (吳漫沙), Six on Pan Lei (潘壘), and Nine on Rimuy Aki (里慕伊． 阿紀) ). It should be lauded for its granular close readings combined with critical theoretical profferings. One may tap into its abundant repertoire for miscellaneous approaches and its thorough survey of secondary literature as well as its careful introduction of the authors, while its critical and nuanced engagement with the secondary literature, together with its suggested theoretical interventions, propel a strong momentum for researchers in the field of Taiwanese literature.