New Taiwanese Literature, also referred to as Taiwanese New Literature or by the Japanese name Taiwan Shinbungaku, was a literary magazine published briefly during the period of Japanese rule over Taiwan

Taiwan under Japanese rule

Between 1895 and 1945, Taiwan was a dependency of the Empire of Japan. The expansion into Taiwan was a part of Imperial Japan's general policy of southward expansion during the late 19th century....

. The editor-in-chief, Yang Kui

Yang Kui

Yang Kui 楊逵 was a prominent writer in Taiwan's Japanese colonial period. Raised in Japanese-language schools, he went to the Japanese mainland, where he experienced both persecution and acceptance, especially by Japanese communists. Under these influences he became a proletarian novelist...

, had previously been on the board of another journal, Taiwan Bungei, but left after a dispute regarding editorial policy and established New Taiwanese Literature. The first issue was published in December 1935. Yang supported the magazine with his own funds, soliciting contributions from not only local writers, but Japanese writers of the proletarian literature

Proletarian literature

Proletarian literature refers to the literature created by working-class writers for the class-conscious proletariat, published by the communist parties. It was a literature without literary pretensions....

 movement such as Hayama Yoshiki

Hayama Yoshiki

is a Japanese author associated with the Japanese proletarian literature movement. He is perhaps best known for Men Who Live on the Sea　海に生くる人々, a novel about the appalling labor conditions on factory ships, and for short stories such as The Prostitute 淫売婦, an early example of proletarian...

, Ishikawa Tatsuzō, and Hirabayashi Taiko

Hirabayashi Taiko

was the pen-name of a Japanese author. Her real name was Hirabayashi Tai.-Biography:Hirabayashi resolved at the age of 12 to become a writer and also developed an interest in socialism at a young age. After graduating from the Suwa Women’s Higher School in 1922, she moved to Tokyo and began living...

 as well as Korean writer Chō Kakuchū. In total, 15 issues of the magazine went to press. It published works in Japanese as well as Chinese, but was nevertheless ordered to cease publication in April 1937 in part of a wider campaign to prohibit the use of the Chinese language

Chinese language

The Chinese language is a language or language family consisting of varieties which are mutually intelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages...

. Its closure represented the start of a period of stasis in the development of Taiwanese literature which would last until Yang Yun-ping established the Shijin Kyōkai (詩人協会) in 1939.