Asian Literature Book List ·

Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India, 1780–1913

A Critical Anthology

Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India, 1780–1913: A Critical Anthology makes accessible for the first time the entire range of poems written in English on the subcontinent from their beginnings in 1780 to the watershed moment in 1913 when Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize in Literature.…

Power Plays

Wayang Golek Puppet Theater of West Java

Based on ethnographic fieldwork spanning twenty years, Power Plays is the first scholarly book in English on wayang golek, the Sundanese rod-puppet theater of West Java. It is a detailed and lively account of the ways in which performers of this major Asian theatrical form have engaged with political discourses in Indonesia.…

Secrets Need Words

Indonesian Poetry, 1966-1998

The period from 1966 to 1999 represents a distinct era in Indonesian history. Throughout the “New Order” regime of President Suharto, the policies of economic development and political stability were dominant.…

Language, Power, and Ideology in Brunei Darussalam

Contrary to modern theories of developing nations, Brunei Darussalam, which has a very high rate of literacy, is also one of the few countries where the traditional elite retains absolute political power.…

Language Use and Language Change in Brunei Darussalam

The oil-rich sultanate of Brunei Darussalam is located on the northern coast of Borneo between the two Malaysian states of Sarawak and Sabah. Though the country is small in size and in population, the variety of language use there provides a veritable laboratory for linguists in the fields of Austronesian linguistics, bilingual studies, and sociolinguistic studies, particularly those dealing with language shift.…

Beyond the Archipelago

Selected Poems

A collections of 70 poems from one of Malaya’s leading poets, that depict longing, loneliness, modernization, and insights in Malaysian culture.

Dictionary of Indonesian Islam

Drawing from an extensive list of writings about Indonesian Islam that have appeared over the past fifteen years, Federspiel defines approximately 1,800 terms, phrases, historical figures, religious books, and place names that relate to Islam and gives their Arabic sources.…

Cage of Fireflies

Modern Japanese Haiku

Haiku at its best is an art in which the poet takes a natural, most ordinary event, and without fuss, ornament or inflated words makes of it a rare moment—sparely rendered, crystallized into a microcosm which reveals transcendent unity.…

Text/Politics in Island Southeast Asia

Essays in Interpretation

How does the language of poetry conspire with the language of power? This question is at the heart of this volume which deals with Indonesia and the Philippines in the early modern and post-1945 periods.…

The Tale of Prince Samuttakote

A Buddhist Epic from Thailand

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Thai poets produced epics depicting elaborate myths and legends which intermingled the human, natural, and supernatural worlds. One of the most famous of these classical compositions is the Samuttakhoot kham chan, presented here in English for the first time as The Tale of Prince Samuttakote.…

The Voice of the Night

Complete Poetry and Prose of Chairil Anwar

Chairil Anway (1922-1949) was the primary architect of the Indonesian literary revolution in both poetry and prose. In a few intense years he forged almost ingle-handedly a vital, mature literary language in Bahasa Indonesia, a language which formally came to exist in 1928.…

Dumpling Field

Haiku of Issa

Koyashi Issa (1763-1827), long considered amoung Japan’s four greatest haiku poets (along with Basho, Buson, and Shiki) is probably the best loved. This collection of more than 360 haiku, arranged seasonally and many rendered into English for the first time, attempts to reveal the full range of the poet’s extraordinary life as if it were concentrated within a year.…

Not Out of Hate

A Novel of Burma

Not Out of Hate is the first Burmese novel to be translated into English and published outside of Myanmar. It offers unusual insights into the social history of the late colonial period. Set in pre-World War II Burmese society, the story centers on the relationship and marriage of seventeen-year-old Way Way with U Saw Han, a much older Burmese agent for a British trading company.…

The Indigenization of Pali Meters in Thai Poetry

During the Ayutthaya period in Thailand (1350-1767), a group of meters based upon specific types and arrangements of syllables became a significant part of the Thai literary corpus. Known as chan in Thai literature, these meters, and the stanzas created from them, were adapted and transformed so that they corresponded in structure to other Thai verse forms.…

Studies in Austronesian Linguistics

This volume consists of seventeen articles by scholars including Robert Blust, Paul Hopper, A. L. Becker, Sarah Bell, J. C. Catford, Talmy Givón, J. W. M. Verharr and John U. Wolff. Tagalog, Cebuano, Ilokano, Chamorro, Malay, Old Malay, Javanese, Old Javanese, Indonesian, Niases, Loniu, and Niuean are some of the languages discussed in the study.…

Essays on Contemporary Chinese Poetry

This first critical study of major contemporary Chinese poets in English treats the work of Chi Hsien, Cheng Ch’ou–yu, Chou Mengtieh, Lomen, Yungtzu, Ya Hsien, Yip Wai–lim, Wu Sheng, and Yu Kuang-chung.…

Language and Social Change in Java

Linguistic Reflexes of Modernization in a Traditional Royal Polity

Errington explores linguistic evidence of social change among the traditional priyayi elite of Surakarta in south-central Java. Employing data from texts, interviews, observed speech, and questionnaires, he shows a progressive leveling in the language used to denote traditional status differences, and he demonstrates how perceptions of speech styles reflect etiquette and the views of the users.…

Vocabulary Building in Indonesian

An Advanced Reader

An outstanding advanced text intended to complement and supplement Indonesian language materials now available. The author takes the student through a series of original essays and previously published material on a variety of subjects, not merely explaining grammatical and vocabulary matters, but offering detailed discussions of nuances, alternative meanings, synonyms and antonyms.…

Javanese

A Cultural Approach

Foreign language lessons often provide translations into a foreign language of phrases students would normally use in their native language and cultural setting. Particularly when studying a non-Western language, such direct translation is very misleading.…