This edited book considers the need for the continued dismantling of conceptual and cultural hegemonies of ‘East’ and ‘West’ in the humanities and social sciences. Cutting across a wide range of literature, film and art from different contexts and ages, this collection seeks out the interpenetrating dynamic between both terms. Highlighting the inherent instability of East and West as oppositional categories, it focuses on the ‘crossings’ between East and West and this nexus as a highly-charged arena of encounter and collision. Drawing from varied literary contexts ranging from Victorian literature to Chinese literature and modern European literature, the book covers a diverse range of subject matter, including material drawn from psychoanalytic and postcolonial theory and studies related to race, religion, diaspora, and gender, and investigates topical social and political issues —including terrorism, nationalism, citizenship, the refugee crisis, xenophobia and otherness. Offering a framework to consider the salient questions of cultural, ideological and geographical change in our societies, this book is a key read for those working within world literary studies.
Table of Content
INTRODUCTION.- East/West: What’s at Stake?.- part i: COMPARATIVE AND CROSS-CULTURAL APPROACHES.- “Liu Hsieh and Mark Turner: The Elucidation of Literary Minds”.- “Crossing Frontiers: English Romanticism and Sufism as Literary Movements”.- PART II: Transnational orient(ations) and EMPIRES.- “‘The Democracy of Art’: Elizabeth Keith and the Aesthetic of the Eastern Ordinary”.- “From Victorian England to Colonial Korea: Desire and Subversion in Chan-wook Park’s
Ah-ga-ssi (
The Handmaiden)”.- PART i II: Immigration, “RACE”, AND Antinomies of NATION.- “Identity and Mis/Identification: The Asylum Seeker in Roma Tearne’s
The Swimmer”.- “Korean/American Literary Images of Black Amerasians”.- part i V: TRANSLATING MEMORY and SUBALTERN HISTORy.- “Graphic Visions: Translating Chinese History through Collaborative Graphic Autobiography”.- “Memory, Empathy, and Narrative in Meena Kandasamy’s
The Gypsy Goddess”.- Conclusion.- “In Lieu of a Conclusion: East and West as Regions of Consciousness”.
About the author
Sharmani Patricia Gabriel is Professor and Head of the Department of English, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Universiti Malaya, Malaysia. She researches and teaches primarily in the fields of postcolonial literary studies, with a particular interest in the cultural politics of identity and ideas of race, diaspora, migration and multiculturalism. She is Editor-in-Chief of SARE: Southeast Asian Review of English.
Nicholas O. Pagan is Visiting Professor at the Department of English, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Universiti Malaya, Malaysia. His research interests include literary theory and criticism, literature and philosophy, science, and spirituality. He has published on a number of literary theorists and also on the philosophy of mind, science, American literature, theatre studies, and film. He is currently working in the area of phenomenology, play, and literary minds. He is the author of Theory of Mind and Science Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
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