Abstract
In the 1970s, Taiwan had undergone a series of political, economic, and cultural transformations involving three separate but interrelated aspects: colonialism, class exploitation, and gender politics. If our understanding of the past is nothing more than a kind of articulation-the interpretation of each entity and the linking up of different ones, then literature can be viewed as an articulation through characters and plots as well as metaphors and symbols. Taking Yang Qing-chu''s Factory Girls and Chen Yingzhen''s The Sage of Multinational Business as primary examples, this paper seeks to elucidate the ways which these two writers used to articulate the issues of nationalism, class, and gender by asking the following questions: (1) What are the institutions of class domoniation in their respective works? (2) How is it possible for factory workers, especially females, to resist or fight against the hegemonic structure of management and production? (3) What would be the alternative imagination of the native capitalist class? This paper attempts to clarify these two writers'' differences and similarities through a comparative perspective in hopes of finding their limitatoins and insights on the class as an example for reflecting on Taiwan''s current histocial status.