This Festschrift engages in the richness and variety of literatures and cultures of the Malay world, and goes beyond its shores to encounters between different cultures and traditions, and to the relationship between literary and other disciplines. Rainbows of Malay Literature and Beyond communicates the absorbing richness of inter-disciplinary study and knowledge.

“This collection of nature poems is resonant and appealing. They record lyrically the beauty of the landscape of USM campus that is just an emerald at the edge of the straits, with dense trees hundreds of years old, little enchanting slopes, and valleys adorned with plants, as well as clear, clean lakes and flowing waters. Most interestingly this is expressed through moods of the months and seasons of an equatorial climate. All the more so, when these poems are accompanied by sketches which are also captivating.” Priv.-Doz. Dr. Arndt Graf Department of the Languages and Cultures of Southeast Asia Asia-Africa-Institute University of Hamburg “Such magnificent poems that make one want to stay in this campus! Such a rich nature that can be nothing else than an invitation to study and to find the multitude of ideas.” Monique Lajoubert Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris “… translators … let the poets’ words bloom and sing. My good friends, Md. Salleh Yaapar and Lalita Sinha, have lent their exceptional talents to these poems. I am sure the beauty of their rendering will carry these poems beyond the shores of Penang and Malaysia.” Muhammad Haji Salleh

This is a detailed, narrative–based history of Classical Malay Literature. It covers a wide range of Malay texts, including folk literature; the influence of the Indian epics and shadow theatre; Panji tales; the transition from Hindu to Muslim literary models; Muslim literature; framed tales; theological literature; historical literature; legal codes; and the dominant forms of poetry, the pantun and syair. The author describes the background to each of these particular literary periods. He engages in depth with specific texts, their various manuscripts, and their contents. In so doing, he draws attention to the historical complexity of tradisional Malay society, its worldviews, and its place within the wider framework of human experience. Dr. Liaw’s History of Classical Malay Literature will be of benefit to beginning students of Malay Literature and to established scholars alike. It can also be read with benefit by those with a wider interest in Comparative Literature and in Southeast Asian culture in general.

This book brings together fourteen articles by prominent critics of Malaysian Anglophone literature from five different countries: Australia, Italy, Malaysia, Singapore, and the US. It investigates the thematic and stylistic trends in the literary products of selected writers of the tradition in the genres of drama, fiction, and poetry, from its beginnings to the present, focusing mainly on the postcolonial themes of ethnicity, gender, diaspora, and nationalism, which are central to the creativity and imagination of these writers. The book explores the works of not just the established writers of the tradition but also those who have received little critical attention to date but who are equally gifted, such as Adibah Amin, Edward Dorall, Rehaman Rashid, and Huzir Suleiman. The chapters collectively address the challenges and achievements of writers in the English language in a country where English is widely used in daily life and yet marginalised in the creative domain to elevate the status of writings in the national language, i.e., Bahasa Malaysia. The book will demonstrate that in spite of such recurrent neglect of the medium, Malaysia has produced a number of outstanding writers in the language, who are comparable in creativity and craftsmanship to writers of other Anglophone traditions. The book will be of interest to readers and researchers of Malaysian literature, postcolonial literatures, minority literatures, gender studies, and Southeast Asian studies.

Scholarly works considering traditional Malay letters from a literary point of view are scarce. In this book, classical Malay literature of the 16th through the 19th centuries is viewed in the context of more than a millennium of medieval Malay letters.

This book, the first comprehensive survey of traditional Malay literature in English since 1939, embraces more than a millennium of Malay letters from the vague data of the seventh century up to the early beginnings of the modern literatures in the late nineteenth century. The long path trodden by traditional Malay literature is viewed in historical and theoretical perspectives as a development of an integral system, influenced by cultural and religious changes, primarily by gradual Islamization.