A critical rereading of Lu Xun's “Diary of a Madman,” a canonical text in modern Chinese literature, suggests a need to invoke modernism as a historicizing concept and to rethink modern Chinese literary historiography. Contrary to the conventional view of Lu Xun's story as no more than a realist fiction, the new interpretation shows how the work persistently and ingeniously articulates a modernist sensibility of time as well as a modernist politics of language. The Madman's madness not only expresses a self-consciousness that is radically modern in its break with a traditional gemeinschaft but also demarcates a new, oppositional symbolic order and practice. At the forefront of the historical New Culture movement, this archetypal text of deconstructive reading simultaneously promises a critical and a productive discursive strategy. The work's modernism, finally, requires modernity to be understood as both a concrete historical experience and a global situation.

Few debates about literary concepts, properties, and traditions in the contemporary Chinese-speaking world have generated as much passion and anxiety and given rise to as much intellectual provocation and reflection as the controversy over the notion of "Taiwan literature" that broke out in Taiwan in the early 1980s and kept its galvanizing force well into the 1990s. The number and variety of writings devoted to the debate are simply extraordinary, while the range as well as the depth of the topics examined goes well beyond academic literary studies or campaigns for stylistic innovations. At issue is apparently the definition and positioning of "Taiwan literature," but in this sprawling debate, literary discourse largely serves as a contentious field through which a symbolic reconfiguration is carried out. Incidentally, the conventional English rendition of "Taiwan wenxue" into "Taiwan literature" brings to the fore the crux of the contention: 1 should it be understood as "Taiwanese literature" instead? What, then, would "Taiwanese literature" connote? And what would be the relationship between this body of literature and Chinese literature? More specifically, what if any relationship is there between literatures from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China? In offering their different, often emotionally charged answers to these questions, participants in the debate cannot help but address, either directly or implicitly, questions of origins, political legitimacy, hegemonic practices and 379 AUTHOR'S NOTE: I thank Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang, Jason McGrath, Gan Yang, and Modern China's two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments. I also gratefully acknowledge a summer stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities that facilitated research on the project. Unless a quoted writer has a different name for his or her English publications, pinyin is used to romanize all names and phrases in Chinese for the sake of convenience. It is difficult to ascertain how names are romanized on an individual basis when Wade-Giles is not the only approach used in Taiwan.

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Based on archival research, this article presents a succinct history of the street theater movement in China through the 1930s. It examines how complex discourses and competing visions, as well as historical events and practices-in particular the War of Resistance against Japan-both shaped and propelled the movement. The author focuses on theoretical and practical issues that promoters and practitioners of street theater dealt with and reflected on in three succeeding stages. Observing that the street theater movement hastened the formation of a modern national imagination, the author argues that the movement presented a paradigmatic development as it foregrounded the imperative to engage rural China as well as the need for participants to acquire new subject positions.

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