Abstract
This study explored the works of four contemporary Taiwanese female writers, Hsiao-Hung Chang, Yu-Fen Ko, Hwei-Ching Chang, and Wen-Jiuan Wang, to show how they have gone beyond the lyric tradition of prose writing. The works of these writers focus on a metropolitan perspective, with a scholarly quality that has an international vision and academic way of thinking and training. Their keen observations enable them to turn seemingly ordinary people in modern urban life into interesting subjects. Thinking profoundly, they express their concern over various aspects of city life and draw out the social implications of seemingly ordinary city landscapes.To understand how these writers represent the various spaces of a house, this study examines each room in turn. After a thorough exploration of the house, the external spaces of the city are also examined to understand the relationships among people, houses and the city. Looking at various objects indoors or outdoors, from inside to outside, from small to large ones presents a micro view of the small items in a house and a macro view of big ones in a city, and suggests that a small space in a city is equivalent to my big room.
In sum, the works examined in this paper are more of a microfilm of society evolved from the particulars of people to the universals of community, representing the isolation and alienation of city-dwellers in modern civilization, an issue that deserves research and discussion in the context of today’s social culture.
| Date of Award | 2012 |
|---|---|
| Original language | Chinese (Traditional) |
| Supervisor | Mei-Tzu Tsai (Supervisor) |