Rigid forms are not capable of accommodating the content of drastic social changes and the constant fluctuation of the minds and hearts of the people.  How to make use of the nativist spirit in literature to depict the pluralistic age and thereby to manifest the spirit of the time and literary features in the 1990s is an important task.

     Yanagi Muneyoshi, a Japanese folklore scholar, once said:

     The cultural power of a country comes from the strength of the internal regional culture in that country.  When the regional culture is weak, the overall national culture will also lose its character.

     These are the words of a wise man who had devoted all his life to the research of folklore, and they are still worth our pondering today.  Taiwanese society, in which the Han culture predominates, has in fact gradually formed a merger with various features of the indigenous culture through the process of migration and settlement over the last three or four hundred years.  Geographically, Taiwan is situated between the Asian Continent and the Pacific Ocean, between Northeast Asia and the Southeast Asia.  Its culture possesses various features of complexity, which are precisely the valuable sources of literary expression.  Take the whole island as an example.  There are differences in the south, north, east and west, more or less.  If literary workers dig hard into regional characteristics, write profoundly, and delineate the collective life experiences of the people, they will be able to enrich the culture of each region naturally.      Since October 1965, Chung Chao-cheng has edited ten volumes of the Pen-sheng- chi tso-chia tso-p'in hsüan-chi  (Collected Works of Taiwanese Writers) and ten volumes of the T'ai-wan ch'ing-nien wen-hsüeh ts'ung-shu (Literary Series of Young Taiwanese Writers), and Chang Liang-tse has edited eight volumes of the Chung Li-ho ch'üan-chi (Complete Works of Chung Li-ho), six volumes of the Wu Cho-liu tso-p'in chi (Collected Works of Wu Cho-liu), eleven volumes of the Wang Shih-lang ch'üan-chi (Complete Works of Wang Shih-lang), and eight volumes of the Wu Hsin-jung ch'üan-chi (Complete Works of Wu Hsin-jung).  In addition, Li Nan-heng has edited five volumes of the Jih-chü-hsia T'ai-wan hsin-wen-hsüeh (Taiwan New Literature Under the Japanese Occupation), Yeh Shih-t'ao and Chung Chao-cheng have edited eight volumes of fiction, and Chen Ch'ien-wu and Yang Tzu-ch'iao have edited four volumes of new poetry, in the Kuang-fu-ch'ien T'ai-wan wen-hsüeh ch'üan-chi  (Complete Works of Taiwan Literature Before Retrocession).  In between, there were varieties of anthologies, annual anthologies, and more recently, the T'ai-wan tso-chia ch'üan-chi (Complete Works of Taiwanese Writers) published successively by Ch'ien-wei Publishing Company.

1|2|3|4|5