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.

Autorentext

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.

Inhalt

Introduction.- Convergences, Crossings, Contestations: Children's Literature and Film in Asia.- Part I: East.- Children's Literature and Childhood Imagination in 1960s Taiwan: Jen-Mu Pan and the Discourse of "Child Heart".- Parents and Parent-Child Relationships in Contemporary Chinese Children's Literature (1978-2014).- SOCIETY IS A FAMILY: Social Exclusion and Social Dystopia in South Korean Films.- Family Diversity in Recent Japanese Children's Literature.- Mutilation, Metamorphosis, Transition, Transcendence: Revisiting Genderism and Transgenderism in The Little Mermaid through Gake no Ue no Ponyo.- Part II: South and West.- In the Shadows: Tracing Children and Childhood in Indian Cinema.- Engendering Identities: Gay and Lesbian Characters in Contemporary Indian English Young Adult Fiction.- The Demon as "Other" in Sri Lankan Children's Literature: Rambukwella's Mythil's Secret and Asiri's Quest.- Towards a Poetics of Childhood Ethics in Abbas Kiarostami's Children's and Young Adult Films.- Part III: Southeast.- Folktale Adaptation and Female Agency: Reconfigurations of the Mahsuri Legend in Selected Contemporary Malaysian Young Adult Fiction.- Seeking "Unity in Diversity": Contemporary Children's Books in Indonesia.- The Paradox of the Filipino Child: Realist Philippine Children's Stories (1990-2018).- Through Screens and Streams: Digital Liminality and Identities in Philippine Young Adult Speculative Fiction.- Part IV: Diaspora.- Symbiotic Cultural Landscapes: Retelling Chinese Folktales in Ed Young's Picture Books.- Hyphens, Hybrids and Bridges: Negotiating Third spaces in Asian-American Children's Literature.