2021TLA Golden Book Award

About the Book
In this captivating work of scholarship, Chang Hsiao-Hung delves into the “legacy matters” of Eileen Chang, where “supplementarity” serves as a point of departure for an exploration of her last will and testament, objects and portrait photos left behind, the dis-ease haunting her before her death, maternal family legacy, property bequests and body memory. Breaking free from the restrictive notions of “authorship” and “biographical research”, Chang Hsiao-Hung puts forth a lively and ingenious accounting of what it is to be literature, the author, the subject, the writing, the image, and the object.

Judge Commentary (By Lee Kuei-Yun)
Chang herself has stated how she oriented this book toward cultural studies, and also intended “to be more lively and free in the undertaking, while not neglecting the relationship of politics and aesthetics in feminism.” And, while this writer’s prior praise about the “readability” of Chang’s book echoes the expression here of being “lively and free”, what needs to be echoed even more is the academic significance of how Chang has broken through and shattered discursive boundaries; how a discursive text possessing creativity has transgressed beyond the being of just a mere “scholarly thesis”, and how the already overcrowded field of Eileen Chang Studies has gained yet further space in which to soar.