Mapping the Canons and Transcultural Production of Children's Literature in Postwar Taiwan

In 1964, during the period of the Cold War, the Editorial Task Force for Children’s Books was set up in Taiwan as a result of the US economic and cultural aids. It operated symbolically as a crucial site for the institutionalization and canonization of children’s literature in postwar Taiwan. While the society of Taiwan was politically conservative due to the repressive and regulated system of the Cold War and the martial law in the 1960s, the literary production and practices of the Editorial Task Force, paradoxically, tended to “break away with didacticism” to indicate a gesture of change. Negotiating in between various kinds of power structure and struggles--politics, economics, and language policy, etc., the Editorial Task Force was the conspicuous site for the contestations, as well as the conflation, of the ideologies dominated by American culture and Chinese culture; nevertheless, it also pointed, explicitly or implicitly, to the possibilities of “transcultural” mobility and hybridity. Drawing on transcultural theories in understanding the dynamics of culture, both within and without, as “metamorphic, confluential, and intermingling,” this project aims to explore the interactive relations of the operation of the Editorial Task Force and the Cold War/ US aids, as well as to re-examine the canonization of children’s literature in postwar Taiwan, in terms of the connectedness and convulsions of “individuals,” “texts,” “ideas,” and “thoughts.” In the first year, the project will center on Munro Leaf and Helen R. Sattley, children’s literature authors and scholars from the US, to understand their literary productions for children in American contexts, as well as to see their acts of cultural crossings and (trans)cultural productions in relation to the Editorial Task Force in the 1960s. In the second year, the project will focus on Lin Hai-yin and Pan Ren-mu as well as their literary productions for children and the roles which they played in the Editorial Task Force, to bring to light their impacts on (or inputs to) the canonization of children’s literature in postwar Taiwan, not in terms of containment or the Cold War ideology, but the dynamics of transculturality and mobility.