The library also holds a complete volume set of Suwenxue congkan 俗文學叢刊 / Folk Literature: Materials in the Collection of the Institute of History and Philology (Taipei: Shin Wen Feng, 2002–2006). For further information on the ongoing indexing project, please see Database.
Wu Kuan-Wei (Curriculum Vitae) is a current Ph.D. student who works on Taiwanese intellectual history and focuses on studying Joshua Wen-kwei Liao 廖文奎 (1905–1952), including biographical research and social and political thought.
He is also the co-author of Liao Wenkui wenxian xuan 廖文奎文獻選 (Selected Papers of Joshua Wen-Kwei Liao, 2021) with Wu Rwen-ren, published by National Taiwan University Press. For his preliminary finding, see Joshua Wen-Kwei Liao (1905–1952): A Founding Theorist of Taiwanese Independence (2021) on Taiwan Insight.
Ego or personal documents of Taiwanese modernizing intellectuals who lived throughout the Japanese colonial period are valuable research material in furthering our understanding of Taiwan history and its historiography. Subject matter of the proposed research is a selection of the ego-documents of Cai Peihuo and his contemporaries, such as Wu Sanlian, Ye Rongzhong, Xie Chunmu, and Lin Xiantang, amongst others. The intention is an analysis of these ego-documents not so much as a record of the events of the time but as a reflection of a particular kind of consciousness or mentality. More specifically, the research is interested in exploring what these documents reveal about the social and mental context of Taiwanese colonial society during the 1920s and 1930s. In a first part, it provides an analysis of Cai Peihuo’s writings, with special reference to his diary (1929–1936). The second part looks at the autobiographies and memoirs of his contemporaries. As a literary genre, diaries are ‘momentary glimpses’, autobiographies are reflections on events that are not in close chronological proximity but written some time later. It intends to produce a detailed analysis of these ego-documents to evaluate their usefulness as complementary historical sources and how they reflect on the interconnections and interdependencies between a postulated past and an experienced present. Special reference will be made to the use of language, ideas, and key terms in unraveling the complexity of the Taiwanese collective memory. This research project aspires to illuminate methodological approaches of reading a historical narrative that describe the uniqueness of individual experience and, at the same time, draws out a portrait of a community and its mentality with respect to the particularities of specific historical contexts. It will be complemented by a discussion of the postwar nationalist discourse in the context of Asian nations.