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The fourteen chapters in this book examine various topics and contexts of travel writings on China, Japan, and Southeast Asia. From the first Colombian on a trade mission to China, to French women travelers in Asia, and the opening of Japan Fairs in the US during the latter half of the nineteenth century, this book offers a kaleidoscopic glimpse of the various cultures in the eyes of their beholders coupled with understanding of the various politics and relationships that are involved.

This book explores interactions between Japanese and Chinese writers during the golden age of such exchange, 1919 to 1937. During this period, there were unprecedented opportunities for exchange between writers, which was made possible by the ease of travel between Japan and China during these years and the educational background of Chinese writers as students in Japan. Although the salubrious interaction that developed during that period was destined not to last, it nevertheless was significant as a courageous essay at cultural interaction. Major writers in this work include Lu Xun and Zhou Zuoren on the Chinese side and Tanizaki Jun'ichiro and Hayashi Fumiko on the Japanese side.

The literature of Malaysia and Singapore, the multicultural epicentre of Asia, offers a rich body of source material for appreciating the intellectual heritage of colonial and postcolonial Southeast Asia. Focusing on themes of home and belonging, this book illuminates many aspects of identity anxiety experienced in the region, and helps construct a dialogue between postcolonial theory and the Anglophone literatures of Singapore and Malaysia. A chronologically ordered selection of texts is examined including Swettenham, Bird, Maugham, Burgess, and Thumboo. This genealogy of works includes colonial travel writings and sketches as well as contemporary diasporic novels by Malaysian and Singapore-born authors based outside their countries of origin. The premise is that home is a physical space as well as a symbolic terrain invested with social, political, and cultural meanings.

Eileen Chang (1920–1995) is arguably the most perceptive writer in modern Chinese literature. She was one of the most popular writers in 1940s Shanghai, but her insistence on writing about individual human relationships and mundane matters rather than revolutionary and political movements meant that in mainland China, she was neglected until very recently. Outside the mainland, her life and writings never ceased to fascinate Chinese readers. There are hundreds of works about her in the Chinese language but very few in other languages. This is the first work in English to explore her earliest short stories as well as novels that were published posthumously. It discusses the translation of her stories for film and stage presentation, as well as nonliterary aspects of her life that are essential for a more comprehensive understanding of her writings, including her intense concern for privacy and enduring sensitivity to her public image. The thirteen essays examine the fidelity and betrayals that dominate her alter ego's relationships with parents and lovers, informed by theories and methodologies from a range of disciplines including literary, historical, gender, and film studies. These relationships are frequently dramatized in plays and filmic translations of her work.

This study of the entire written works of Gao Xingjian, China's first winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, analyses each group of his writing and argues for a reading of Gao's writing as a phenomenon of “cultural translation”—his adoption of modernism in the 1980s is a translation of the European literary paradigm, and his attempt at postmodernist writing in the 1990s and 2000s is the effect of an exilic nihilism expressive of a diasporic subjectivity struggling to translate himself into his host culture. This book looks at Gao's works from a double perspective—in terms of their relevance both to China and to the West. Avoiding the common polarized approaches to Gao's works, this book's dual approach means that it neither extols them as the most brilliant works of contemporary Chinese literature eligible for elevation to the metaphysical level, nor dismisses them as nothing more than elitist and misogynist mediocre writings; rather the book sees this important body of work in a more nuanced way.

The fiction of Lu Xun (1881–1936) deals with China moving beyond the 1911 Revolution. He asks about the possibility of survival, and what that means, even considering the possibility that madness might be a strategy by which survival is made possible. Such an idea calls identity into question, and Lu Xun is read here as a writer for whom that is a wholly problematic concept. This book makes use of critical and cultural theory to consider these short stories in the context of not only Chinese fiction, but in terms of the art of the short story, and in relation to literary modernism. It attempts to put Lu Xun into as wide a perspective as possible for contemporary reading.

This collection reveals how, in Manchukuo (1932-1945), literature both furthered national aims while contesting them, as writers of varied ethnicities engaged in multivalent strategies to continue cultural production amidst difficult political circumstances. Studies of their work by transnational scholars today demonstrate that these writers faced factors influencing outcomes of their production, such as censorship, the Japanese puppet regime's propaganda aims, and even the market. In addition, particular hybrid language practices emerged, with writers engaging in transnational practices in a border region. This volume examines what we call "Manchukuo perspectives" unique to cultural producers in a state transformed by Japanese interests, but later shaped by more inclusive multivalent aims, reflected in the writings of Chinese, Korean, and Russian intellectuals who felt a keen loss of nation, which also included Japanese converted leftists who transformed their antipathy towards imperialist capitalism into support for a fascist state offering the utopian promises of a "right-wing proletarianism".

This book is a close examination of travel writing in seventeenth-century China, presenting an innovative reading of the youji genre. Taking the “Account of My Travels at Yellow Mountain” by the noted poet, official, and literary historian Qian Qianyi (1582–1664) as its focus, this book departs from traditional readings of youji, by reading the landscape of Qian's essay as the product of a complex representational tradition, rather than as an empirically verifiable space. Drawing from a broad range of materials including personal anecdotes, traditional cosmographical sources, gazetteers, Daoist classics, paintings, and woodblock prints, the book explores the fascinating world of late-Ming Jiangnan, highlighting the extent to which this one scholar's depiction of Yellow Mountain is informed, not so much by first-hand observation, as by the layers of meaning left by generations of travelers before him. The book includes the first complete English-language translation of Qian Qianyi's account, and presents a critical study.

This is the first collection of English essays on Du Fu, commonly regarded the greatest Chinese poet. Contributed by well-known experts of Chinese literature as well as scholars of a younger generation, these essays are engaged in historically nuanced close reading of Du Fu’s poems, both canonical and less known, from new angles and in various contexts. They discuss a series of critical issues, including the local and the imperial; the body politic and the individual body; poetry and geography; perspectives on the complicated relation of religion and literature; materiality and contemporary reception of Du Fu; poetry and visual art; tradition and modernity. Many of the poems analyzed in the volume were written in the backwater Kuizhou, far from Du Fu’s earlier residence in the capital city Chang’an, at a time when the Tang dynasty was going through devastating social and political disturbances. The authors contend that Du Fu’s isolation from the elite literary establishments allowed him to become a pioneer who introduced a new order to the Chinese poetic discourse. However, his attention to details in everyday reality, his preoccupation with domestic life and the larger issues embroiled in it, his humor, and his ability to surprise tend to be obscured by the clichéd image of the “poet sage” and “poet historian”—an image this collection of essays successfully complicates.