Asia-Pacific and Literature in English – serie

This volume centres exchange as an analytical tool to conceive of Anglo-East Asian entanglements in literature, culture, and media from the eighteenth century until today. In its capacity to host diverse experiences, representations, and mediations, exchange enables the discussion of productive, reciprocal, often contested cross-cultural intersections, transfers, and flows, which may initiate long-term processes of hybridisation and transculturality. At its heart, this volume explores how transcultural exchanges have shaped the formation and self-perception of ‘eastern’ and ‘western’ identities and how these processes have been constructed, complicated, and negotiated in fiction, travel writing, philosophical and economic texts, theatre, film, music, manga, multi-media installations, and exhibitions. In our examination of Anglo-East Asian exchanges, we illustrate that the lines between binary oppositions are blurry at best; the manifold types of exchanges considered here offer inroads into a deeper understanding of the separating as well as uniting factors between East Asia and the anglosphere.

This book examines the reception of British Romanticism in India and East Asia (including China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan). It explores the connections between canonical British Romantic authors (including Austen, Blake, Byron, Shelley, and Wordsworth) and prominent Asian writers (including Natsume Soseki, Rabindranath Tagore, and Xu Zhimo).

This volume provides a key analysis of Asian children’s literature and film and creates a dialogue between East and West and between the cultures from which they emerge, within the complex symbiosis of their local, national and transnational frameworks.

This volume provides a key analysis of Asian children’s literature and film and creates a dialogue between East and West and between the cultures from which they emerge, within the complex symbiosis of their local, national and transnational frameworks.

Contesting the idea that the study of Anglophone literature and literary studies is simply a foreign import in Asia, this collection addresses the genealogies of textual critique and institutionalized forms of teaching of English language and literature in Asia through the 19th and 20th centuries, along with an examination of how its present options and possible future directions relate to these historical contexts. It argues that the establishment of Anglophone literature in Asia did not simply “happen”: there were extra-literary and -academic forces at work, inserting and domesticating in Asian universities both the English language and Anglo-American literature, and their attendant cultural and political values. Offering new perspectives for ongoing conversations surrounding the globalization of Anglophone literature in literary and cultural studies, the book also  considers the practicalities of teaching both the language and its canon of classic texts, and that thehistorical formation and shape of English studies in Asia offers lessons that relate not only to the discipline but also may be applied to the humanities as a whole.​

Contesting the idea that the study of Anglophone literature and literary studies is simply a foreign import in Asia, this collection addresses the genealogies of textual critique and institutionalized forms of teaching of English language and literature in Asia through the 19th and 20th centuries, along with an examination of how its present options and possible future directions relate to these historical contexts. It argues that the establishment of Anglophone literature in Asia did not simply “happen”: there were extra-literary and -academic forces at work, inserting and domesticating in Asian universities both the English language and Anglo-American literature, and their attendant cultural and political values. Offering new perspectives for ongoing conversations surrounding the globalization of Anglophone literature in literary and cultural studies, the book also  considers the practicalities of teaching both the language and its canon of classic texts, and that thehistorical formation and shape of English studies in Asia offers lessons that relate not only to the discipline but also may be applied to the humanities as a whole.​

This collection of essays expands the study of that immensely widely read and much-adapted novel, beyond the first book – The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (usually known simply as Robinson Crusoe) – to take in the far less well-known Farther Adventures and the almost unread Serious Reflections, beyond Defoe’s texts, to their re-writing and adaptation and beyond the Atlantic and South American context to an Asian and Pacific context.  The essays consider both how Asia is represented in the books (in terms of politics, economics, religion), and how the book has been received, adapted, and taught, particularly in Asian contexts.

This collection of essays expands the study of that immensely widely read and much-adapted novel, beyond the first book – The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (usually known simply as Robinson Crusoe) – to take in the far less well-known Farther Adventures and the almost unread Serious Reflections, beyond Defoe’s texts, to their re-writing and adaptation and beyond the Atlantic and South American context to an Asian and Pacific context.  The essays consider both how Asia is represented in the books (in terms of politics, economics, religion), and how the book has been received, adapted, and taught, particularly in Asian contexts.

This pioneering collection delves into Jane Austen's enduring legacy in the East, exploring her significance to  East-West relations, Westernization, and Asian identities. It enriches Austen studies by integrating Asian viewpoints on feminism, queer theory, postcolonialism, and her reception and adaptations. The essays examine Austen's relevance in contemporary Asia, her historical ties to the region, and diverse Asian responses from the 20th century to recent adaptations. Spanning academic and popular media, it covers translations, critiques, and creative interpretations in various formats. Though not exhaustive, it offers insights from India, Pakistan, China, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan, contributing to a nuanced understanding of Austen's global impact.

This book investigates the ways in which the family unit is now perceived in South and Southeast Asia and the Asian diaspora: its numerous conceptions and the changes it has undergone over the last century and into the new one.

This book offers a key analysis of the changing perceptions of family in East Asian societies and the dynamic metamorphosis of “traditional” family units through the twentieth century and into the new millennium.

“‘Who is … the Proust of the Paphuans?’, Saul Bellow infamously inquired, as if this vast expanse were too small, scattered and backward to deserve consideration. In response to this challenge, Pacific Gateways seeks to define a new (if provisional) canon. This diverse, insightful and compelling collection applies ethnographic perspectives (contact zone, participant-testimony, indigeneity) to a diverse range of genres (romance, travelogue, memoir) to demonstrate how the Pacific already prefigures and generates later networks of global exchange. It offers not retrospect into a distant past, but intimations of possible futures, as a portal into alternative forms of planetary consciousness.” (Steve Clark)This book explores the entanglements of Anglophone literature with Pacific geographies, histories, and cultures during the long nineteenth century, giving a transpacific context to Victorian writers including Dickens, Kingston, Stevenson, and Trollope, and setting them alongside Pacific Rim writers such as Bret Harte, Lafcadio Hearn, Joseph Heco, and Yei Theodora Ozaki. The chapters focus upon the physical and imaginative “gateways” produced by Western technology, including the port city, the steamship, telegraph lines, and the networks of international trade and finance. These Pacific gateways shape the development of a “transpacific consciousness” in Anglophone literature, whose modes of exchange and patterns of thought can still be seen in modern-day attitudes to the region. The book aims to present a polyglot and cross-cultural history of Anglophone literature in the Pacific, in which Anglo-American imperialism coexists with established intra-Asian networks.Chapter 1 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0International License via link.springer.com

This book examines how the early twentieth-century Irish Renaissance (Irish Literary Revival) inspired the Chinese Renaissance (the May Fourth generation) of writers to make agentic choices and translingual exchanges.