Hong Kong Literature and the Taiwanese Encounter: Literary Magazines, Popular Literature, and Literary Adaptation, 1950s–1990s
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
3:00 pm to 5:00 pm
- Venue
- Paul Webley Wing, Senate House, SOAS University of London, WC1H 0XG
- Room
- Wolfson Lecture Threatre (SWLT)
About this event
The article investigates post-war literary adaptations between Hong Kong and Taiwan, highlighting how they influenced both literary cultures and led to hybrid identities.
This article examines the ways literary adaptations between Hong Kong and Taiwanese writers shaped literary cultures in both places during the post-war period. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Hong Kong and Taiwan literary cultures were starting to thrive. These literary cultures gave rise to a literary magazine culture in both places. An influx of literati into both places collaborated with each other and the locals to experiment with literary forms in these literary magazines.
The 1950s and 1960s were also when Hong Kong and Taiwan cinema experienced their first waves of adapting literary works into film in the post-war period. After the short-lived literary magazine culture dwindled in the 1970s, new generations of writers in Hong Kong and Taiwan gradually emerged.
These Hong Kong writers may not be native to Hong Kong, but they all take Hong Kong as their main subject in their writings. The Taiwanese writer Shih Shu-ching is one of them. In studying Hong Kong-Taiwanese literary relations and adaptation, one may easily overlook the adaptation from fiction to playscript, as in Shih Shu-ching and Wang Chi-mei’s case, because literary adaptation often refers to adapting a literary work into film.
By understanding the literary relationship between Hong Kong and Taiwan in this period, together with their adaptation histories, we can acquire a clearer sense of how these hybrid literary subjectivities developed.
This event is open to public and no need for registeration.
Meet the speaker
Dr Jessica Siu-yin Yeung is Research Assistant Professor at the Centre for Film and Creative Industries of Lingnan University. Her essays have appeared in Cultural History, Archiv orientální, Journal of World Literature, Humans at Work in the Digital Age (Routledge), Cultural Conflict in Hong Kong (Palgrave Macmillan), a/b: Auto/Biography Studies and Virginia Woolf Miscellany.
She co-edited a special issue on Comedies in East Asian Media of Archiv orientální and is co-editing another special issue on Women and Chineseness in Cinema and Media: Traditions and Trends at the Journal of Chinese Cinemas. She is working on a few essays on Hong Kong and Taiwan literature and cinema during the Cold War and writing a book on semiotics, queerness and allegory in Taiwan and Hong Kong novels and cinema.
