Asian Children’s Literature and Film in a Global Age

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.

• 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.

“It was high time for this book, whose authors present Asian children’s literature and films as expressions of their specific cultures of origin, but also within the complex symbiosis of their local, national, transnational, global, and glocalized networks. … This volume has marked a beginning in challenging asymmetry in the field of literary criticism, shifting research to cultures of origin, dismantling Western Orientalist perspectives, and giving Asian children’s literature research the place on the global stage it deserves.” (Lucia Obi, A Journal of International Children's Literature, Vol. 59 (3), 2021)