Reading Malaysian Literature in English: Ethnicity, Gender, Diaspora, and Nationalism

Mohammad A. Quayum

Nov 2021 · Asia in Transition Book 16 · Springer Nature

Ebook

216

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About this ebook

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.

About the author

Mohammad A. Quayum is a veteran critic of Malaysian Anglophone literature with thirteen books and numerous articles on the subject to his credit. He has also published extensively on such leading American and South Asian writers as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Rabindranath Tagore, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, and Saul Bellow. After teaching for over four decades at universities in Australia, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Singapore, and the US, he hastily retired from International Islamic University Malaysia in 2020 to return home to Australia because of the pandemic. He is currently Adjunct Professor at Flinders University and the University of South Australia. His latest publications include A Feminist Foremother: Critical Essays on Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (Orient BlackSwan), Festschrift: The Poetry and Poetics of Shirley Geok-lin Lim (in the Journal of Transnational American Studies, Stanford University), Malaysian Literature in English: A Critical Companion (Cambridge Scholars Publishing), and Tagore, Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism (Routledge).

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