Despite differences in the political, social, and economic systems of Taiwan and mainland China, the process of modernization in both has challenged traditional cultural norms. Tonglin Lu examines how differences in cultural formation between Taiwan and China have influenced reactions to modernity and how cultural identity has taken different forms on both sides of the Taiwan straits. She illustrates how these differences in the experience of modernity are expressed through analysis of paradigmatic films produced in both countries, with a particular emphasis on their formal experiments.

This feminist perspective on Chinese modernism focuses on six writers: Lu Xun, Mo Yan, Can Xue, Zhaxi Dawa, Su Tong, and Yu Hua. Partly because Confucianism perceived women and fiction as inferior, radical intellectuals in modern China used them to represent their subversive positions. Women and fiction became related by a shared inferiority. Lu argues that the sometimes ambivalent attitude of contemporary Chinese male writers toward women reveals an inherent limit to their subversion. The refusal of male writers to accept women as equals represents a nostalgic attachment to the hierarchical...

Despite differences in the political, social, and economic systems of Taiwan and mainland China, the process of modernization in both has challenged traditional cultural norms. Tonglin Lu examines how differences in cultural formation between Taiwan and China have influenced reactions to modernity and how cultural identity has taken different forms on both sides of the Taiwan straits. She illustrates how these differences in the experience of modernity are expressed through analysis of paradigmatic films produced in both countries, with a particular emphasis on their formal experiments.