Taiwan Literature: English Translation Series, No. 49

For this special issue on "New Generation Women's Fiction from Taiwan," we have specially invited Professor Lee Kuei Yun of the Graduate Institute of Taiwan Literature at Taiwan's Tsing Hua University to be guest editor and take responsibility for the selections. Because of space limitations it has been possible only to select twelve short stories by eleven woman writers. These writers were all born in the 1970s or later and their works were published in the year 2000 or later. Thus, they represent a period of social change in twenty-first century Taiwan and the spirit of the new generation. The introduction that we asked Professor Lee to provide is entitled "Trauma, esire, Contemporary Women's Voices." Aside from giving a brief account of the eleven writers and their works, Professor Lee sketches "a number of writerly qualities that become perceptible... [that] represent the internal trauma, female consciousness, physical lust, cat-uman metaphors, and everyday life, etc." In her introduction, what she particularly stresses is that the sexual desire depicted in these works exposes the internal wounds derived from private individual experience hidden away in the deepest levels of the female consciousness that are exposed for direct observation, and "... [from this] we can tease out a clear semblance of a feminine texture that reverberates with the unique sound of contemporary women's voices." This then is one of the most important qualities of the new generation of aiwanese women's fiction. In the final analysis, trauma and writing about desire are two major themes of Taiwanese women's literature.