Asian Literary Voices: From Marginal to Mainstream

Brings together some of the most exciting recent scholarship on Asian literature and culture, emphasising East Asia yet extending to South Asia

Combines original findings of interest to specialists with a clear style of writing and argumentation that makes the volume accessible and appealing to the general reader

Brings to life a wide range of Asian literary and scholarly figures important in their time and remain relevant and yet whose significance has been poorly understood

Philip F. Williams is Language and Culture Curriculum Developer at the Mansfield Center, University of Montana. He is also Emeritus Professor of Chinese Language and Culture from Arizona State University.

"Professor Williams is to be congratulated for producing this excellent book of essays representing the best of the conference volume genre. Its ten articles, six of them on twentieth-century China, evince the highest quality of recent research on increasingly mainstream Asian literary voices. The scope is truly impressive. It includes a reinterpretation of some Sanskrit women writers, concepts of the ideal lover, historical fiction and elite women’s reading in Choson Korea and Meiji Japan, how Europeans invented 'Sinology,' reevaluations of Bing Xin’s works and André Malraux’s vision of the Chinese Revolution, fin-de-siècle Chinese 'bad girl' exhibitionist fiction, and a particularly significant study of the changing image of Chinese migrant laborers from atomized individuals to networking social protesters. There is something new and important to be learned from each of these essays. I strongly recommend this book to comparative literature specialists and all those interested in Greater Asia."
Michael S. Duke Professor Emeritus of Chinese and Comparative Literature at University of British Columbia

"Asian Literary Voices presents a captivating panoply of novel approaches to Asian Literature. Ranging across a wide expanse from South Asia to Northeast Asia, the ten inquisitive and energetic authors explore a variety of topics from Bad-Girl Writers in contemporary China to Sanskrit poetesses in medieval India, from urban migration to avant-garde theater, and from genre paintings to writing systems. Readers of this ample volume will discover a rich assortment of eye-opening and hitherto unexplored Asian literary realms."
Victor H. Mair Professor of Chinese Language and Literature, University of Pennsylvania