Asian Children’s Literature and Film in a Global Age (eBook)

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. In terms of location and content the book embraces a broad scope, including contributions related to the Asian-American diaspora, China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, South Korea, Sri Lanka, and Taiwan. Individually and collectively, these essays broach crucial questions: What elements of Asian literature and film make them distinctive, both within their own specific culture and within the broader Asian area? What aspects link them to these genres in other parts of the world? How have they represented and shaped the societies and cultures they inhabit? What moral codes do they address, underpin, or contest? The volume provides further voice to the increasingly diverse and fascinating output of the region and emphasises the importance of Asian art forms as depictions of specific cultures but also of their connection to broader themes in children's texts, and scholarship within this field.

Bernard Wilson is Adjunct Professor at the University of the Sacred Heart and Gakushuin University, Japan. He has researched and taught at universities in Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan, and specializes in postcolonial literature, children's literature, and cinema. He is widely published in Southeast Asian literature and East/West theory, and his work has appeared in leading international journals throughout the world.

 

Sharmani Patricia Gabriel is Professor of English at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Her recent book publications include Cosmopolitan Asia: Littoral Epistemologies of the Global South (co-edited, Routledge, 2016), Literature, Memory, Hegemony: East/West Crossings (co-edited, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), and Making Heritage in Malaysia: Sites, Histories, Identities (edited, Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming). She is currently working on several projects, one of which is a monograph on diaspora and the novel in English of Malaysia.

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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. In terms of location and content the book embraces a broad scope, including contributions related to the Asian-American diaspora, China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, South Korea, Sri Lanka, and Taiwan. Individually and collectively, these essays broach crucial questions: What elements of Asian literature and film make them distinctive, both within their own specific culture and within the broader Asian area? What aspects link them to these genres in other parts of the world? How have they represented and shaped the societies and cultures they inhabit? What moral codes do they address, underpin, or contest? The volume provides further voice to the increasingly diverse and fascinating output of the region and emphasises the importance of Asian art forms as depictions of specific cultures but also of their connection to broader themes in children's texts, and scholarship within this field.