This collection of essays is the culmination of a symposium on the representation of Malays and Malay culture in Singaporean and Malaysian literature in English held in Universiti Putra Malaysia.

This book brings together fourteen articles by prominent critics of Malaysian Anglophone literature from five different countries: Australia, Italy, Malaysia, Singapore, and the US. It investigates the thematic and stylistic trends in the literary products of selected writers of the tradition in the genres of drama, fiction, and poetry, from its beginnings to the present, focusing mainly on the postcolonial themes of ethnicity, gender, diaspora, and nationalism, which are central to the creativity and imagination of these writers. The book explores the works of not just the established writers of the tradition but also those who have received little critical attention to date but who are equally gifted, such as Adibah Amin, Edward Dorall, Rehaman Rashid, and Huzir Suleiman. The chapters collectively address the challenges and achievements of writers in the English language in a country where English is widely used in daily life and yet marginalised in the creative domain to elevate the status of writings in the national language, i.e., Bahasa Malaysia. The book will demonstrate that in spite of such recurrent neglect of the medium, Malaysia has produced a number of outstanding writers in the language, who are comparable in creativity and craftsmanship to writers of other Anglophone traditions. The book will be of interest to readers and researchers of Malaysian literature, postcolonial literatures, minority literatures, gender studies, and Southeast Asian studies.

The global is an instituted perspective, not just an empirical process. Adopted initially by the British in order to make sense of their polyglot territorial empire, the global perspective served to make heterogeneous spaces and nonwhite subjects "legible," and in effect produced the regions it sought merely to describe. The global was the dominant perspective from which the world was produced for representation and control. It also set the terms within which subjectivity and history came to be imagined by colonizers and modern anticolonial nationalists. In this book, Sanjay Krishnan demonstrates how ideas of the global took root in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century descriptions of Southeast Asia. Krishnan turns to the works of Adam Smith, Thomas De Quincey, Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir, and Joseph Conrad, four authors who discuss the Malay Archipelago during the rise and consolidation of the British Empire. These works offer some of the most explicit and sophisticated discussions of the world as a single, interconnected entity, inducting their readers into comprehensive and objective descriptions of the world. The perspective organizing these authors' conception of the global-the frame or code through which the world came into view-is indebted to the material and discursive possibilities set in motion by European conquest. The global, therefore, is not just a peculiar mode of thematization; it is aligned to a conception of historical development unique to European colonial capitalism. Krishnan troubles this dominant perspective. Drawing on the poststructuralist and postcolonial approaches of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and challenging the recent historiography of empire and economic histories of globalization, he elaborates a bold new approach to the humanities in the age of globalization.

Through a set of comparative studies of the fiction of Joseph Conrad, Jean Rhys, and Pramoedya Ananta Toer, The Passage of Literature explains the interrelation between English, Creole, and Indonesian formations of literary modernism, arguing that each passage of literature is the site of contest between competing genealogies of culture.

The fifteen chapters in this volume explore both new and tested theoretical perspectives on literature and culture at large; this multiplicity of discourses is a reflection of the implicit discontent in conforming to the New World Order, and a contestation against hierarchical relationships between countries, which inform the social, cultural and political climates of weaker nations. With the political and economic hegemony of stronger nations, weaker nations run the risk of being dominated, or at the very least, having their own national identity and sovereignty steeped in ambivalence in the face of a globalised culture. This volume hopes to bring together critical views in relation to the construction of cultural studies in the Western framework, the application of literary theory in the readings of vernacular literature, contestation of the mainstream scientistic methodology of cultural evaluation, the role of English literature in Asian cultures, the application of postcolonial theory in literature, literary ethics in relation to Islamic literature, as well as the Islamic and Western conceptions of democracy. More than half of the articles in this collection centre on Islam as a guiding principle, or as a context through which critical perspectives are made on literature and culture in today’s globalised world order. This inadvertent foregrounding of Islam reflects a continuing dialogue on and with Islam and its significant impact on existing academic discourses founded upon Western-style scholarship.

This book, Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir Munshi, is the most comprehensive, multi-disciplinary studies on Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir, widely known as Munshi Abdullah (1796-1854). He was a prominent literary figure and thinker in the Malay world in the 19th century and was also an early 'pioneer' of Singapore.The author, Professor Hadijah Rahmat, has spent more than 25 years studying Munshi Abdullah since her PhD studies in the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, in 1992 to date. This book is covered in two volumes and is based on her research conducted using unexplored primary sources at several missionaries' archives at SOAS, London, Houghton Library, University Harvard, Library of Congress, Leiden University, KITVL, Holland, and the Perpustakaan Nasional Indonesia, Jakarta.The book consists of numerous academic papers presented at the regional and international seminars, and also published in international journals and as chapters of books. Besides academic papers, the excerpt of play titled Munsyi, sketches, poetry, and song, and interviews by the national media are also included.This book provides new insight into Abdullah's life, backgrounds, writings, his influences and legacies and the reactions and thought provoking views of the western and eastern scholars on Abdullah. The book is indeed the key reference for studies on Munshi Abdullah, Malay literature, and the history of Singapore, Malaysia, and colonialism in Southeast Asia.

Daniel R. Schwarz has studied and taught the modern British novel for decades and now brings his impressive erudition and critical acuity to this insightful study of the major authors and novels of the first half of the twentieth century. An insightful study of British fiction in the first half of the twentieth century. Draws on the author’s decades of experience researching and teaching the modern British novel. Sets the modern British novel in its intellectual, cultural and literary contexts. Features close readings of Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow, Joyce’s Dubliners and Ulysses, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse and Forster’s A Passage to India. Shows how these novels are essential components in a modernist cultural tradition which includes the visual arts. Takes account of recent developments in theory and cultural studies. Written in an engaging style, avoiding jargon.