This interdisciplinary study brings together perspectives from literature, anthropology, sociology, political science, economics, history, philosophy, and art to explore the culture of a fully industrialized society with a traditional Chinese background.

Foreword -- Introduction: Change and Contention in Taiwan's Cultural Scene -- Culture in "Crisis": Views of the Past and Outlooks for the Future -- Cultural Policy on Postwar Taiwan -- Civil Society and Taiwan's Quest for Identity -- Taiwan and the Confucian Aspiration: Toward the Twenty-first Century -- Culture at the Individual Level: Education and Attitudes -- Investment in Education and Human Resource Development in Postwar Taiwan -- Transformation of Farmers' Social Consciousness in Postwar Taiwan -- culture with a Small c: Everyday Life -- Changes in Postwar Taiwan and Their Impact on the Popular Practice of Religion -- Playing in the Valley: A Metonym of Modernization in Taiwan -- Tourism, Formulation of Cultural Tradition, and Ethnicity: A Study of the Daiyan Identity of the Wulai Atayal -- Culture with a Big C: Literature and the Arts -- Sociocultural Change in Taiwan as Reflected in Short Fiction: 1979-1989 -- Modern Poetry in Taiwan: Continuities and Innovations -- Painters of the Postwar Generation in Taiwan -- Feminist Consciousness in the Contemporary Fiction of Taiwan