This introduction serves to provide a sketch of the circumstances that led to the prominence of "nativist," or xiangtu literature from the Republic of China (i.e. Taiwan) in the late twentieth century. Huang Chunming, the author of the stories featured in this thesis, has been a prolific writer from the east of the Taiwan Straits since 1962, and has contributed to the popularization of Taiwanese xiangtu literature in the decades of the island's industrialization experience. In Huang's world of fictional characters, readers have multifaceted records of the Taiwanese people's lives and the culture of their native soil.

This thesis illustrates a general sense of national identity within the Taiwanese people brought on by the Kuomintang (KMT) and existing throughout the KMT's reign over the island, and contrasts this with the new identity that came to exist in the post-KMT period. Comparisons are centered around two works of literature: Sayonara, Zaijian!, written in 1979 by Chunming Huang, and My Diary of Japanomania, written in 1999 by Hari Xingzi. Louis Althusser's view of history-based on structural materialism, complexity and overdetermination---will be employed to discuss and explain the contrast between Sayonara, Zaijian! and My Diary of Japanomania in order to discover how national subject is formed and how it interacts within ideology.

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