Wai-chew Sim

Neil Murphy

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Framing the Contemporary

British Asian Fiction

Angelia Poon

A Collection of Short Stories from Singapore

Island Voices

In this outstanding collection of essays, editors Neil Murphy and Wai-chew Sim seek not so much to demarcate the field of British Asian fiction, but to offer due acknowledgment of the artistic merit of the works of selected authors and simultaneously register their cultural significance. This volume demonstrates in situ the virtues of commentary that engages in a substantial manner with formal and aesthetic considerations, even as it implicates the discourses of alterity that dominate contemporary cultural criticism. Additionally, the essays delineate the complex subject positions explored by authors and texts, and focus on the way writers negotiate the exigencies of their location within and between different social formations. If it is the case that British literature can no longer be discussed in monocultural terms because of the impact of the writers under consideration, it is also the case that the diverse trans-cultural positions they explore are often less specified than proclaimed. Addressing difference, commensurability, and form-related notions of truth-content, these essays enlarge our understanding of the range of British (and affiliated) identities, as well as the cultural contexts from which they arose. Working as academics and critics from Singapore, a useful vantage point, Murphy and Sim have extended the parameters of British Asian to include, not just writers from South Asia as is traditionally the case, but writers whose parents, or who themselves, have migrated to Britain from other regions of Asia, for example, Japan, Hong Kong, and Malaysia. This initiative has made it possible for professors Murphy and Sim to bring together, first, an interestingly varied group of authors, among them those who came to prominence in the 1980s Salman Rushdie, Timothy Mo, Kazuo Ishiguro as well as their younger contemporaries Meera Syal, Romesh Gunesekera, Monica Ali, Hari Kunzru, Ooi Yang-May; and, second, a broad and diverse range of novels that span Timothy Mo s Sour Sweet (1982) and Tariq Ali s A Sultan in Palermo (2005), the fourth volume in his Islam quintet."

Having earned an international reputation with his booker-prize-winning novel, The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro is fast emerging as an important cultural figure of our times. In this guide to Ishiguro’s varied and often experimental work, Wai-chew Sim presents: a biographical survey of Ishiguro’s literary career, and an introduction to his novels, plays and short stories an accessible overview of the contexts and many interpretations of his work, from publication to the present discussions of key topics in Ishiguro criticism such as narrative theory, multicultural Britain and postcolonial studies, psychoanalytic criticism, and Ishiguro as international writer cross-references between sections of the guide, in order to suggest links between texts, contexts and criticism suggestions for further reading. Part of the Routledge Guides to Literature series, this volume is essential reading for all those beginning detailed study of Kazuo Ishiguro and seeking not only a guide to his works but also a way through the wealth of contextual and critical material that surrounds them.

Kazuo Ishiguro

Anglo-Japanese author Kazuo Ishiguro has garnered considerable critical and popular acclaim since his novel, The Remains of the Day, won the Booker prize in 1989. Presently, there is no adequate explication of his fiction employing a well thought-out critical framework to address some of the debates about contemporary literary and cultural studies. This book examines Ishiguro's fiction and how it tackles certain genre forms and exceptionalist cultural assumptions.

Wai-chew Sim

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