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Writing Taiwan: A New Literary History.

Article Excerpt
Wang, David Der-Wei, and Carlos Rojas., eds. Writing Taiwan: A New Literary History. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2007. x + 412 pp.

In Critical Terms for Literary Study, Lee Patterson points out the often-unrecognized ambiguity of the term "literary history." The commonsensical meaning of the term refers to an intrinsic history of literature that deals with the history of either literature as a whole or of specific modes, genres, or forms. There is also an extrinsic approach that focuses on the relation of literature to the historical "forces that caused, governed, entailed, or are expressed by literary texts" (250). While the intrinsic/extrinsic divide captures mainstream practices over the last hundred years, more recent inquiries into "literary history" take a new path. Linda Hutcheon, in Rethinking Literary History, challenges the dominance of the national model of literary history, a model she argues has always been premised on ethnic and often linguistic singularity. Hutcheon queries: "In our twenty-first-century globalized, multinational, and diasporic world, how can we explain the continuing appeal, not only of the single-nation/single-ethnicity focus of literary histories, but also of its familiar teleological model, deployed even...

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