Abstract:
The period of Kuomintang rule (1945-1987) is increasingly recognised as displaying re-colonial characteristics. In particular，the regime was defined by the extended period of marital law which ensued after the suppression of the February 28 Incident in 1947 and continued until 1987. This thesis takes a postcolonial approach to offer for the first time a systematic analysis of the representation of the Incident and the ensuing White Terror in Taiwanese fiction. Twenty-one works published between 1947 and 2008 by a broad spectrum of writers are analyzed, including works by both established and relatively unknown writers and by aboriginal writers and those of other vernacular languages. Postcolonial strategies in Taiwanese literature are located within the broader context of postcolonial critique and are shown to display a remarkable array of parallels and synergies with this wider discourse. A persistent theme which emerges is the question of writerly partisanship and the collaborative reading strategies which this invites, through a range of areas of post/colonial experience, including national allegory women's subjectivity and the recuperation of history and language.
