Abstract
Due to the inappropriate government policy on agriculture in Taiwan, the decline of agricultural sectors, the migration of rural populations, and the widening discrepancy between urban and rural development have become increasingly prominent issues since the 1970s. Responding to the crises, a new generation of writers such as Lin Shuangbu and Song Zelai attempted to represent and document these agricultural problems in their peasant fiction. While most preceding research focused on the images of peasants in peasant fiction and their represented social reality, this project shifts its focus to the narrative form and the ideology of form, as well as to the consequential representational modes of different realisms. Lin Shuangbu''s ”Lin Jinshu, the Asparagus Farmer” (1984), combines realism with the genre of fable, stipulating the binary opposition of good and evil and therefore failing to capture the dynamics of the market. Song Zelai''s ”The Legends of Xiao Gui and Xiao Sheng” (1978) and ”The End of the World for the Pigs in Youle Village” (1979), on the contrary, combine modem realism with the traditional Chinese novelistic form, succeeding in mapping out the complex network of the modern capitalist free market and going beyond the binary opposition between the oppressor and the oppressed. Based on the theory of American Marxist Fredric Jameson, this project inquires into the epistemic aspect of peasant fiction, rethinking the global network of capitalism and the possibility of change in an exploitative system in which the exploiter has obscured his own face.