臺灣文學虛擬博物館

Modernism is a historical phenomenon of great significance in the global history of modern development. Found within is an incredibly rich array of ideas and content.

❝…… on or about December 1910, human character changed.❞ 
                                                  ——Virginia Woolf, "Character in Fiction"

Taiwan was also involved in this momentous era when modernist beliefs and values transcended borders across the world. Since the 1920s, when the movement was first introduced during the Japanese colonial era, modernism has left its impressions on the intellectual and literary circles of Taiwan. American modernism entered Taiwan via military and economic aid during the Cold War, when the world was divided into two camps. Suppressed by martial law, the trends of post-war Taiwanese literature, art, and society were led towards modernization by American modernism. 

❝ History …… is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.❞
                                                                    ——James Joyce, Ulysses.

To highlight the influence of modernism on the Western world and American literature in particular, the National Museum of Taiwan Literature has organized the special exhibition "Shining Stars of Modernism: American and Taiwan Literature." This exhibition centers on three masters of American modernist literature: F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), William Faulkner (1897-1962), and Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961). Literary translations published by the United States Information Service (USIS) are used as a channel to introduce the works of these American writers and showcase the qualities of modernist literature in the United States from the 1920s to the 1950s. Exhibited alongside them are modernist works and other historical materials from Taiwan. This juxtaposition illustrates how Taiwanese modernism is both a form of horizontal transplantation, and yet also a movement brimming with a robust spirit of innovation. 

❝ You are a lost generation. ……
You have no respect for anything. You drink yourselves to death. ❞
           ——Gertrude Stein in Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast.

As Taiwanese writers of that era absorbed and collided with the techniques and ideologies of Western modernism, their distinctive qualities created bright literary sparks that would go on to shine like stars in the night sky.