ABSTRACT
Southeast Asia encompasses a huge diversity of peoples, languages, societies, cultures and literary traditions. English came to the region fairly recently, as part of the growth of European and American imperialism, and stayed past the era of empires to become a key intermediary for the processes of modernity and globalization. The modes of literary expression it has inspired make for a compelling story. Our narrative is mindful that a more complete picture would need to relate literary expression in English to writing in other major languages of the region. Within that larger ideal – difficult to realize within the confines of a single book even for a group of regional scholars – the narrative of literary productions from and about Southeast Asia in English merits reading on its own. Our main aim is to bring together texts that experts in their respective fields tend to treat separately, and our enterprise has profited from the work of scholars who have helped bring the Anglophone writing from the various regions of Southeast Asia together in a comparative context. We hope that this book will serve as a useful introduction to the literatures of Southeast Asia in English.
