Books in the Asia-Pacific and Literature in English series

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.

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 the historical 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 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.