Abstract
The scholarship on Yang Qing-Chu's fiction has focused on social, economic, and political issues such as class conflict, social change, economic inequality, gender hegemony, and labor alienation. Against this backdrop, this paper first pinpoints “love” as the locus of his stories; but in contrast to popular romance, where love conquers all, Yang’s love stories reveal the economic characteristics of love, sex, and marriage, thereby subverting the romance formulas that often revere the myth of romantic love. First, through their depiction of intimate, sexual, and marital relationships, love stories reveal the transformations occurring in the economy. In addition, Yang’s love stories explore the phenomenon of reification that has penetrated both the public and private domains. Third, while his stories seem to indicate the homology between the markets of mating and labor, the story of “The Dance Party” suggests that there is conflict between the individual and the collective, that is, between one’s romantic pursuits and one’s alliances in the interest of the working class. Finally, Yang’ two novels enquire into the trinity of love, nature and art, revealing the relationship of romanic love and class privilege in a capitalist society. Through reflection theory, this paper hopes to shed some new light on Yang Qing-Chu's fiction and to reaffirm the significance of Marxist criticism in the study of Taiwanese literature.