Volume 9, Issue 2, May 2017
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Letter from the Editor
When preparing an issue of Transnational Literature, the last thing I do before writing the editor's note is to compile the contributors' page. For some that might seem like a mere formality. I'm not sure how many people will click through and view the list of bio notes of our authors – forty-odd academics, students, poets, memoirists and novelists from just about everywhere you can think of: Saudi Arabia, Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, Japan, India, Hong Kong, Greece, Bangladesh, South Africa, USA, UK, Italy, Malaysia and, yes, Australia.
But I always get excited when I compile the list. We deal with our authors mainly by email, of course, which effectively erases distance, but imagine the many thousands of miles our messages have had to travel, in how many different directions, to prepare for just one issue of the journal.
Real-life travelling is a theme in several of the contributions to the May issue: Nivedita Misra writes about Naipaul’s tramps and travellers, there is a short story from Gay Lynch and a memoir from Wendy Jones Nakanishi on visiting and revisiting distant places, and several poems and reviews touch on the theme of travelling.
The postcolonial experience is never far from the thoughts of our contributors. Meyre da Silva writes about the Portuguese novelist Pauline Chizine 'performing postcoloniality', while Laura Deane's review essay discusses pathways to a postcolonial settlement between Australia's government and our Indigenous peoples. Mohammad A. Quayum's essay on Rabindranath Tagore explores the great poet and novelist's efforts to maintain integrity in the face of violence and disillusion.
Meta-fiction makes its appearance in Veronica Ghiradi's article on recent Hindi novels, while Kelly Palmer considers the implications of Arundhati Roy's experience in writing place on her own writing practice. Muneerah Badr Almahasheer considers the displaced female voice in the poetry of Russian exile Natalya Gorbanevskaya, and while Virginia Yeung's essay on Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go is not about literal exiles, there are abundant resonances in the themes of mortality and memory.
Six wonderful poems, plus two in translation (one from Greek and one from Bangla), and two absorbing pieces of prose writing, make up the creative writing section of this issue.
And lastly, as always, a good range of book reviews, ranging across poetry, biography, fiction, history, theory and criticism round out the issue.
My grateful thanks as always to all the peer reviewers and members of the editorial team who worked on this issue. Special and rather melancholy thanks to Heather Taylor Johnson, our poetry editor, who is leaving us after nearly five years in the role. We are, however, delighted that Alison Flett, who stepped in as guest poetry editor in November 2014, has agreed to take over from Heather from the November 2017 issue.
I do recommend you read the Contributors' list, but leave plenty of time to browse through the contents of this new issue: I'm sure you will find them even more exciting.
Gillian Dooley, General Editor
Recent Submissions
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Editor's note and contents page for Volume 9, no. 2, May 2017
(2017-05)Editor's note and contents page for Volume 9, no. 2, May 2017 of Transnational Literature. -
Contributors to Transnational Literature, Volume 9, no. 2, May 2017
(2017-04-30)Contributors to Volume 9, no. 2, May 2017 -
Complete book reviews (Creative and Life Writing)
(2017-04-30)Complete book reviews (Creative and Life Writing) for Transnational Literature, May 2017, in one file for ease of downloading or printing -
Complete book reviews (History, Theory and Criticism)
(2017-04-30)Complete book reviews (History, Theory and Criticism) for Transnational Literature, May 2017, in one file for ease of downloading or printing -
Complete articles, Transnational Literature May 2017
(2017-04-30)Complete articles for Transnational Literature, May 2016, in one file for ease of downloading or printing -
Complete poetry and translations Transnational Literature May 2017
(2017-04-30)Complete poetry and translations for Transnational Literature, May 2017, in one file for ease of downloading or printing -
Mortality and Memory in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go
(2017-04-30)This article offers a reading of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go as a meditation on human mortality. Set in an alternate England in the 1990s, the tragic love story revolves around the relationship between three human ... -
Review of Island Home: A Landscape Memoir by Tim Winton
(2017-04-30)Review of Island Home: A Landscape Memoir by Tim Winton -
Review of Mapping Gendered Routes and Spaces in the Early Modern World edited by Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks
(2017-04-30)Review of Mapping Gendered Routes and Spaces in the Early Modern World edited by Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks -
Review of Economy, Emotion and Ethics in Chinese Cinema: Globalization on Speed by David Leiwei Li.
(2017-04-30)Review of Economy, Emotion and Ethics in Chinese Cinema: Globalization on Speed by David Leiwei Li. -
The First Day’s Sun by Rabindranath Tagore, translated by Reza Haq
(2017-04-30)The First Day’s Sun: poem by Rabindranath Tagore, translated by Reza Haq -
Dancing in the Mirror: Performing Postcoloniality in Paulina Chizine’s Niketche: Uma História de Poligamia
(2017-04-30)Through female characters who decolonise their bodies and reveal their desires, Paulina Chizine’s Niketche:Uma História de Poligamia, reinserts women’s voices in the socio-economic and political affairs of the postcolonial ... -
Review of Saffron and Silk by Anne Benjamin
(2017-04-30)Review of Saffron and Silk by Anne Benjamin -
War, Violence and Rabindranath Tagore’s Quest for World Peace
(2017-04-30)Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), India’s messianic poet and Asia’s first Nobel Laureate (1913), promulgated a vision of peace through the cultivation of the ideologies of Ahimsa, or non-violence, which he derived from the ... -
Review of Twenty-two New Asian Short Stories ed. Mohammad A. Quayum.
(2017-04-30)Review of Twenty-two New Asian Short Stories ed. Mohammad A. Quayum. -
Review esay: The Watch Tower by Elizabeth Harrower
(2017-04-30)Review Essay: The Watch Tower by Elizabeth Harrower -
Review of Quiet City: Walking in West Terrace Cemetery by Carol LeFevre
(2017-04-30)Review of Quiet City: Walking in West Terrace Cemetery by Carol LeFevre