Abstract
Shih Shu-Ching migrated from New York to Taiwan, and then from Taiwan to Hong Kong. Finally, she returned to Taiwan. In the past decades, she tried to write novels in multifarious ways. In the beginning, her works is melancholy modernism. And then, she tried local realism and marriage theme. When she lived in Hong Kong, she described the material culture, entanglement between sexual lust and cultural politic, and critical thinking of post-colonial history in her Hong Kong story series. She also wrote the experience of travel. At last, she wrote the biography of Taiwan history. During the late 1960s to 1970s, there was big changes in Taiwan political and economic environment. United States stopped helping Taiwan in economy. The modernist works focused on personal world, ignoring the social reality. Many writers felt the need to change the literature, should be closer to the era as Intellectuals. Therefore, they began to write social reality. Local realism writing gradually came to life. Under the regression trend of local realism literary, Shih Shu-Ching also began to face realism, trying to write social reality. Shih Shu-Ching published several local realism novels, such as When the Cowbell Rings(1975) and Glazed Tiles(1976),which were based on her hometown “Lukang”. Following the nongovernmental defense movement of 1970s and the trend of regionalism, by writing these two novels, Shih Shu-Ching went along with the mainstream of the times, refelcting the critical thinking of regression trend. This dissertation attempts to observe Shih Shu-Ching’s 70’s local realism writings, When the Cowbell Rings and Glazed Tiles, through the framework of the Cold War era, overseas writing, and the regression trend of local. Observing these two novels, I tried to use the different perspectives to see their specific meanings and location. This dissertation will focus on the writer’s critical thinking of “Regression Trend” from the outer edge of the era, literary context, author's own experience, to the inner edge of the text in the form of aesthetics, themes and the specific narrative perspective. Discussing how the writer represented her critical thinking about“Regression Trend”, and how to seize the symptoms of Taiwan culture. Where was her local regression? From the author’s contexts and the literary background of 1970’s, this dissertation attempts to observe the awareness of issues, particularity, and meanings in Shih Shu-Ching’s writings.