As a woman writer, most likely Hua Yan impresses her readers with romantic plots and has been well known as a writer of romance novels. However, Hua Yan’s fictional writings including her first novel The Lamp of Wisdom in 1961 and Affairs in 2001, twenty novels during 40 years in total, actually are not only concerned with romances between lovers but also situations regarding contemporary China in the 1930s through the 1940s and contemporary Taiwan in the 1950s through the 1990s as well. Meanwhile, her writings had cared more about the issues of feminist consciousness which is further related to traditional Chinese women’s status and their family relationship.
As we know, both Hua Yan and other female novelists such as Lin Hai-yin, Chang Su-Han, Kuo Liang-Hui, Chong Yao, etc. are all well known as “pioneer Taiwanese authoresses” emigrated from Mainland China. But as far as Taiwan Literature is concerned, they have been positioned in different ways even though they were born in similar backgrounds and all came to Taiwan about the same stage. In fact, among those women writers, far different from Lin Hai-yin and others who have entered the hall of fame in history of Taiwan literature, Hua-Yan as well as Chong Yao are considered as representative romance writers.
This research intends to display Hua Yan’s works more comprehensively. Also, it will further analyze her works in very detail. Hopefully, by comparing all the representative works of Hua Yan’s contemporary women writers, through the approaches of combining sociology of literature and Narrative Theory, we can eventually find a proper position for Hua Yan who deserves it in the history of literature. In general, from the discussion of each chapter of my study, the following are the features with which Hua Yan has been successful in her novels: 1. An emotional narrative with creative ideas; 2. Fruitful results with unique experiments in novel form; 3. Emphasis on literature’s educational function; 4. Philosophical revelation; 5. Bringing new hope for “feminine literature.” Therefore, Hua Yan, who deserves to be titled as one of the representative women novelists in the history of Taiwan literature and no doubt, contributed as much as her fellow female representative writers of the 1960s in creating an era of the full-length novels.