During the early stages of its development, Taiwan’s New Literature was intimately connected with realism.
The year 2022 is the one-hundredth anniversary of fiction writing in Taiwan, and also the one-hundredth anniversary of modernist literature in the English-speaking world. For the former, this is the one-hundredth anniversary of the publication of Chui Feng’s “Where Will She Go?” For the latter, it is the one-hundredth anniversary of the publication of James Joyce’s (1882–1941) novel Ulysses, and Anglo-American writer T. S. Eliot’s (1888–1965) poem The Waste Land. When the Alphabet Lab was first established, it also paid tribute to the contribution of modernism in the development of post-war Taiwan literature. In this special fiftieth issue on “Taiwan Fiction and ‘Realism,’” we once again identify and trace out the pathways and objectives of Taiwan’s writer apostles over the past one-hundred years.

台灣新文學的發展，以追風的〈她要往何處去〉為濫觴，發表於1922年，至今剛好一百年。台灣新文學發軔時，歐美現代主義發展已達到高峰，台灣必然受到影響，可見現代主義與現實主義，在台灣的演變是與時並進的。在這一專輯的〈導言〉中，張教授將九篇小説平均分成三個階段：日治時期（1922–1945）、戰後（1945–1991）和當代（1992–），且對作品的創作背景和選錄的考量，一一加以説明。要而言之，所選譯的九篇「寫實主義」小説，題材涵蓋面廣，各以不同的歷史背景，寫實地反映出社會現實。