Overview

Taiwanese Face, Chinese Masks offers a groundbreaking study of the acclaimed Taiwanese poet Yang Mu, whose work challenges dominant narratives of identity, language, and power. Focusing on the decades between the White Terror and Taiwan's democratization, this book explores how Yang Mu used Chinese literary forms to express local resistance, cultural hybridity, and historical memory. Drawing on postcolonial theory and close textual analysis, it examines Yang's poetic strategies-including ambivalence, mimicry, and minor narrative-as ways of navigating and subverting the Kuomintang's Sinocentric discourse. Situating his work within Taiwan's shifting political and cultural landscape, Taiwanese Face, Chinese Masks reveals how literature can register collective trauma while imagining alternative futures. This study contributes to Taiwan studies, Sinophone literary criticism, and postcolonial thought by illuminating how one poet forged a distinctive voice that is both deeply rooted and globally resonant. A vital resource for scholars, students, and readers interested in poetry, politics, and identity in East Asia.

Full Product Details

9781638573760

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Reviews

""Whereas many central figures in Taiwan's post-1949 modernist poetry movement migrated from mainland China, Yang Mu was a native of Hualien. His self-reflexive, erudite, and intellectually rigorous engagement with local history, aesthetic inheritance, and the dynamics of cultural hybridity decisively shaped his poetic corpus. Drawing on postcolonial theory to illuminate this body of work-among the most distinguished achievements in contemporary Sinophone literature-Li's study productively advances and recalibrates English-language scholarship on Taiwanese literature."" -Yvone Sung-Sheng Chang, University of Texas at Austin ""Wen-chi Li's Taiwanese Face, Chinese Masks offers an erudite, thought-provoking, and nuanced study of Yang Mu, Taiwan's foremost lyric poet. Boldly argued, this important book engages the full scope of Yang's oeuvre, illuminating its cultural, social, and political significance. Li demonstrates that Yang is not only among the finest writers in Sinophone literature but also a major voice in world literature."" -Nicolai Volland, Pennsylvania State University

Author Information

Wen-chi Li is a Postdoctoral Mobility Fellow at the Center for the Study of Language and Society (CSLS), University of Bern. He holds a PhD in Sinology from the University of Zurich. His publications include Under the Same Roof: A Poetry Anthology for LGBTQ, Taiwanese Literature as World Literature, and Identity, Multiplicity, and Resistance in Taiwanese Poetry. Dr. Li's co-translated book Decapitated Poetry by Ko-hua Chen was awarded the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize.

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