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Experiencing Taiwan in Taiwanese Nature-Oriented Literature

Publication at Faculty of Arts |
2015

Abstract

The notion of the local, much discussed by the Nativist literary movement in the 1970s, has got another much broader meaning in the environmental literature since the 1980s. It has incorporated the wilderness (荒野), the sea, nature in the cities, all the living and non-living entities into one interconnected community.

It has intertwined them not only literarily but also physically. The Taiwanese natureoriented writers who started to rumble through the countryside, wilderness and cities, to sail on the sea around Taiwan, to observe the habits of birds and animals have mediated their experiences in personal essayistic reflections and fictional stories trying to reshape the Taiwanese imagination of nature through reshaping the posture, movement, sense of place in the dialogue with the Earth beneath their feet and living and non-living entities they have encountered.