The paper claims that tracing Philippine literature back to the pre-colonial epics is an extrapolation of the European model, paradoxically supported by the ideology of nationalism. Russian essays on the history of Philippine literature share the same drawbacks: they claim the existence of pre-colonial written literature, including epics, and trace the genesis of Philippine literature to them. There is no doubt that the archipelago was rich in oral epics, it is documented in early Spanish sources. However, epics were wiped out in the process of Christianization, not a single text in the vernacular has survived. The existence of a vast body of ancient manuscripts written in syllabic scripts in pre-colonial times, as shown by A. Ocampo, is a romantic idea that dates back to presumptions made by Jose Rizal and has never been proved. Written literature with a novel as its pinnacle was formed in medieval Europe on the basis of Greco-Roman heritage, local oral traditions and Christianity. Early written Philippine literature, on the contrary, has excluded local folklore as a pagan lore. Only poetic elements of rhyme and rhythm were preserved, but not the contents. Written literature has evolved during the 17–18 cc. in a society oriented on Christian values and Spanish culture under the influence of borrowed ecclesiastic and lay literary genres of European origin. It is only recently that the rich Philippine oral literature starts to find its way into urban forms of art through theatre, ballet, dance, cinema, TV, comics and horror stories. It presently dominates the last of those ‘democratic genres’. The author’s field materials (1995–2020) on the present-day living epics of several mountain areas of the archipelago are used.
Keywords:
Philippines; Philippine folklore; Philippine oral epics; Philippine literature; national identity; oral and written literature; Spanish-Philippine links
The paper explores the biography and academic career of Professor Mikhail Meyer, a distinguished historian of Ottoman and Turkish studies and President of the Institute of Asian and African Studies, Lomonosov Moscow State University.
The paper focuses on a so far understudied and underestimated problem of contacts between early modern Malay literature with Western writing. Undertaken analysis demonstrates the modes chosen by the Malay author to adapt a well-known foreign novel to literary and ideological context of British Malaya before World War II. The message of Malay version is inspired by Islamic reformist thought and Malay nationalism, which in the first half of the 20th century strongly colored the atmosphere in the colony, producing a socially and politically engaged type of writing. Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster most probably attracted the Malay writer with its focus on the problems of women’s emancipation and education, actively propagated by reformist thought. A certain didacticism of the American novel must have also appealed to Malay audience, brought up on the edifications of traditional verbal culture and literature. The engaged character of the Malay rendering of Daddy-Long-Legs made the writer turn down epistolary form of the original and replace the first-person narrative with third-person. It also led to introduction of a new plot line, which contains the main conflict and partially sidelines the romantic topic. As a result, in Malay reinterpretation, the source text loses its basic generic features.
Keywords:
Malay literature; Western influence; Malaysian short story; early modern prose; epistolary genre; Jean Webster; Ariffin
