Rewriting Memories: Glimpses on the Literary Descriptions of Taipei’s “City South” (Chengnan)

The literary representation of space allows us to understand the landscape not just as a reality external to the narrating subject but as a network of symbols whose deep values and meanings give life to an aesthetic experience. Consequently, the identity of the landscape is not a univocal concept but it stems from the interpretation of the multiple cultural indicators attributed to it. Within the Taiwanese literature, a central field of research aims highlighting and examining literary landscapes as background of literary works. The urban space of Taipei is certainly one of the privileged places, to the point of being today considered an autonomous research topic as Taipeiology. This essay wish to retrace the representation and imagery related to a specified context of Taipei, the so-called “city south” (chengnan), making the reader as a flâneur between spaces and places of the literary texts.