The West at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century: Cultural Landscape, Narrative Ethics and Knowledge Imagination in Popular Fictions in "Hanwen Taiwan Zi Zi Xin Pao"
Resource
人文藝術, 5, 001-039
Journal
人文藝術
Journal Issue
5
Pages
001-039
Date Issued
2009-02
Date
2009-02
Author(s)
Huang, M.E.
Abstract
“Hanwen Taiwan Zi Zi Xin Pao”(漢文臺灣日日新報), published Between 1905 and 1911, systematically in troduced the knowledge of the west in the classification columns such as telegraphs, miscellaneous and discussions, etc. Different from these columns, the fictions of the Post published novels based on people, events, and objects in the west in interesting and poetic ways. As a form of literature, fictions have geographical property. Therefore, these fictions could be further interpreted as the best foundation to express knowledge geography with landscape or even display the western geographical knowledge and imagination skill of people in Taiwan. These fictions were deeply supported by the then social context, having unique historical connection sensation structure. As a newspaper in Hanwen (漢文) with the first publication at the beginning of Japanese colonization, the Post apparently had cross-culture/language literature imagination and culture content of translation/differences to write western things and geographical space and time. Among current researches, I find that number of novels on western countries including the ancient Rome, France, Russia, the U.K., and the U.S, etc, overall, is not as large as those on China and Japan, showing that cognition of western countries of people in Taiwan is still in the beginning, which is different from the order of the relation with nearby world. One can still see unreal or fabricated descriptions, somehow like the narrative time and space between Taiwan and western countries. However, fictions displayed the modern experiences of moving landscape among nations and among cities, enough to stimulate and initiate diverse geographical imagination of the flow of space and changes of scientific objects, authors actually described a world across the nature and countries that belong to the human world of both eastern and western people, daily life images. The authors had their own visions and culture frame, and under the situation of social changes from turning of new knowledge and spread of Western influences to the East, they attempted to defend for their own traditional culture. They use daily life stories of the frame of men and women which is the common description model of western knowledge enlightenment. Despite this, birth and copying of detective stories also the best entry to western modernity and urban civilization. In this paper, I discuss the culture landscape, narration ethics, and knowledge imagination stories in the fictions which wrote by Taiwan writers at the beginning of Japanese colonization. This will help dig that what people in Taiwan knew about the qualities and meanings of the epistemology of the west then and express the thought height of understanding and imagination of the western modernity.
Subjects
西洋
漢文臺灣日日新報
通俗小說
李逸濤
現代性
The west
Hanwen Taiwan Zi Zi Xin Pao
Fiction
Li Yi-tao
Modernity
Type
journal article