Asian Gothic

The essays in this collection acknowledge the rich Gothic tradition in Asian narratives that deal with themes of the fantastic, the macabre, and the spectral. Through close analyses of Asian works using the theoretical framework outlined by Gothic criticism, these essays seek to expand the notion of the Gothic to include several popular Asian works.
Broadly divided into essays on postcolonial Asian Gothic, Asian-American Gothic, and the Gothic writings of specific Asian nations, this volume covers a wide variety of Asian texts. The essays of Part One demonstrate the flexibility of Postcolonial Gothic literature in adopting divergent or even contradictory ideologies. Part Two evokes the Gothic as the theoretical framework from which to interrogate the writings of Asian-American authors Maxine Hong Kingston, Sky Lee, lě thi diem thúy and David Henry Hwang. Part Three studies the Gothic tradition in the national literatures of China, Japan, Korea, and Turkey.

Andrew Hock Soon Ng is a lecturer on literature and film at Monash University in Malaysia. He is also the author of Dimensions of Monstrosity in Contemporary Narratives (Palgrave 2004) and Interrogating Interstices (Peter Lang 2007).

Edited by Andrew Hock Soon Ng
Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages: 252
Bibliographic Info: notes, bibliography, index
Copyright Date: 2008
pISBN: 978-0-7864-3335-3
eISBN: 978-1-4766-1001-6
Imprint: McFarland

Introduction: The Gothic Visage of Asian Narratives
Andrew Hock Soon Ng      1

Part I. Postcolonial Asian Gothic Literature
1. Naipaul, “Muslims” and the Living Dead
Wendy O’Shea-Meddour      19
2. “Where Meaning Collapses”: Tunku Halim’s Dark Demon Rising as Global Gothic
Glennis Byron      32
3. Ghosts of a Demolished Cityscape: Gothic Experiments in Singaporean Fiction
Tamara S. Wagner      46
4. Seeing Through the Evil Eye: Meiling Jin’s Caribbean Counter-Gothic in Gifts from My Grandmother
Paula K. Sato      61
5. Encrypted Ancestries: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day and Its Uncanny Inheritances
Hilary Thompson      73

Part II. Asian American Gothic Literature
6. Sky Lee’s Disappearing Moon Cafe: A Testimony of Incorporation
Nieves Pascual Soler      91
7. The Ghostly Rhetoric of Autobiography: Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior as American Gothic Narrative
Carol Mejia-LaPerle      108
8. The Asian-American Hyphen Goes Gothic: Ghosts and Doubles in Maxine Hong Kingston and lê thi diem thúy
Belinda Kong      123
9. Gothic Aesthetics of Entanglement and Endangerment in David Henry Hwang’s The Sound of a Voice and The House of Sleeping Beauties
Kimberly Jew      140

Part III. The Gothic Tradition in Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Turkish Literature
10. Reading Shi Zhecun’s “Yaksha” Against the Shanghai Modern
Hongbing Zhang      159
11. “Disappearing with the Double:” Xu Xi’s The Stone Window
Amy Lai      176
12. Asian Cell and Horror
Sheng-mei Ma      187
13. The Western Eastern: De-Coding Hybridity and CyberZen Gothic in Vampire Hunter D (1985)
Wayne Stein and John Edgar Browning      210
14. Grotesque and Gothic Comedy in Turkish Shadow Plays
Ayse Didem Uslu      224

About the Contributors      237
Index      241

“Fascinating…valuable…recommended”—Choice