Modern fiction of Southeast Asia: A literary history

摘要

The short story is a neglected form. When literary critics and historians construct national literary canons, they often place short fiction as apprentice work to the larger achievement of the novel, which in turn finds its supremacy challenged by new genres in visual or electronic media. Yet the short story deserves attention in its own right; in many parts of Southeast Asia it has been a dominant literary form during crucial historical periods, often coinciding with social transitions that have produced mass literacy in colonial or new national languages. There are many reasons for this. The short story is relatively easy to write and publish in newly founded periodicals; it lends itself to pedagogical projects of language-learning; it arguably readily incorporates more traditional literary forms such as the folk tale; and its length makes it easy to translate in multilingual societies. As the essays collected in Teri Shaffer Yamada's Modern short fiction of Southeast Asia: A literary history illustrate, short fiction has been central to many modern Southeast Asian literary traditions, and E.U. Kratz's description of Indonesian literature as 'a literature of short stories' might plausibly be applied to other national and transnational traditions in the region.