Though Taiwan has since 1949 been the seat of the Nationalist Government and the domicile of several millions of exiled Chinese, no serious literature has been produced until the late fifties.1 Explanations are not difficult to give. For one thing, since nearly all the important figures of modern Chinese literature have remained in the People's Republic of China,” their works are therefore proscribed for political reasons. Cut off from their mainland base, the disinherited young Taiwanese writers, having no native idols to emulate and anxious to create a tradition of their own, could only import from the West whatever “isms” they considered to be the literary fashions of the day—symbolism, surrealism, existentialism, futurism, modernism, phenomenalism, etc. Quite often, however, what they regarded as daring experiments at the time of initiation later turned out to be
