This essay traces the development of Taiwanese fiction since the 1960's. While the 60’s were a period of aestheticism (“modernism’’), Chinese modernism is never completely a reaction against realism; it shows humanitarian concern for the common people and often is “realistic” in style. Thus the “local color’’ realism of the 70’s, which aimed at accurate portrayal of the native Taiwanese people, was a further development rather than a reaction. In the 80's, a period of greater political freedom and openness, writers began to treat political encounters as symptomatic of the age and its people. Thus while history has a role to play in all three periods, its relation to the narrative becomes crucial in contemporary fiction. Here I analyze the relation between aesthetics (“modernist’’) and ideology (“realist’’) on the horizontal axis, and that between history and the unconscious (of the narrator as individual or group) on the vertical axis. In contemporary writing history functions together with myth and other genres, transforming Taiwanese fiction into something beyond modernism and realism.

modernism, aestheticism, realism, local color, humanitarian, history, narrator, unconscious, ideology, axis