Asian

• 21st Century Literature from the World


  Representative texts and authors from Asian Literature
• Literature


  • Is meant to be universal and diversity
  • Easily translated into other languages
  • The distinct language and inventiveness of certain literature coming from different continents showcase the lives and emotions of their people, while offering the world a view of what happens in their society
• 21st Century Literature of the World


  • 21st century has been producing myriad of literary works that have been revolutionizing the conventional definition of writing
  • Literature of the 21st century focuses not on how a writer flawlessly wrote a literary piece or how figurative his writings are, instead it questions why he wrote it and what did he wish to tell
• Speculative Fiction


  • Literary "super genre," which encompasses a number of different genres of fiction, each with speculative elements
  • Often used as an umbrella term for genre fiction or for narratives that do not fully belong in a particular science
  • It revolutionized the standardized definition of literature all across generations and the world
  • It has given the generation's literature distinct feature: Vibrant, Free, Welcoming and Diverse
• Weltliteratur


  • Literally means "world literature"
  • The concept of weltliteratur is meant be a two-way process: that literature may be shared by one nation to the other so that is a give-and-take process
  • He predicted that the world literature will bring about a "rapid traffic" of information
• North America, Europe, Africa
• • Asia is the cradle of human race, world religions and civilization
  • Asia has 48 countries in total base on United Nations year 2021
  • Asia is known as the biggest continent and most populous continent
• Sub-regions of Asia


  • East Asian Literature
  • South Asian Literature
  • Southeast Asian Literature
  • Central Asian Literature
  • West Asian Literature
• Common themes in Asian Literature

  • Family and community
  • Moral Dilemmas and Human Nature
  • Identity
  • Love and loss
  • War and conflict
• Importance of Asian Literature

  • Understanding cultural perspectives, influencing the global literary canon, and addressing contemporary issues
  • Development through time, impact of historical events, and cross-cultural influences
• Representative authors from Asia
• Charlson Ong


  • Filipino-Chinese writer who has penned award-winning works in Philippine literature
  • He is a well known fictionist who has published collections of his short stories
  • He currently teaches at the University of the Philippines-Diliman
  • Best known Novels: Embarassment of Riches (2002), Banyaga: A Song of War (2006), Blue Angel, White Shadow (2010)
• Filipino-Chinese Literature


  • Is an important part of Philippine literature for it is melting pot of two cultures
  • Important to recognize in world literature, for it may impart the experiences of being a product of two different cultures, which is common experience in the global context
• Banyaga: A Song of War (2006) by Charlson Ong


  This novel spans nearly a century of Filipino history as it recounts the life, times, and fortunes of three immigrants—from the 1920s and the Commonwealth and the War to the new Millennium—who like other foreigners were deemed to have no place in the Filipino imagined community
• Familial ties are important in your life, especially as a student. Your family will always be there for you no matter what happens. So you must your members of your family how much they mean to you in every chance that you get.
• Rabindranath Tagore


  • The Nobel Prize in Literature 1913
  • Residence at the time of award: India
  • Prize motivation: "because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West"
  • Language: Bengali; English
• Rabindranath Tagore


  • He wrote musical dramas, dance dramas, essays of all types, travel diaries, and two autobiographies
  • In 1901, Tagore founded an experimental school in Shantiniketan where he sought to blend the best of Indian and Western traditions
  • After completing studies in England in the late 1870s, he returned to India where he published several books of poetry starting in the 1880s
• "Gitanjali" by Rabindaranath Tagore


  • It is a collection of poetry, published in India in 1920
  • It is a poetic masterpiece that explores the depths of the human spirit and its connection to the divine
  • Themes: love, devotion, nature and the search for meaning
• Murasaki Shikibu


  • She was born into a lesser branch of the noble and highly influential Fujiwara family and was well educated, having learned Chinese
  • She is a Japanese writer and lady-in-waiting who was the author of the Genji monogatari (The Tale of Genji), greatest work of Japanese literature and thought to be the world's oldest full novel
  • Message: Love means opening oneself up to pain, and mistakes always have lasting consequences that often cannot be foreseen
• Haruki Murakami


  • He is a Japanese novelist, short-story writer, and translator whose deeply imaginative and often ambiguous books became international bestsellers
  • First novel, Kaze no uta o kike (1979; Hear the Wind Sing; film 1980), won a prize for best fiction by a new writer
  • Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973 - which had previously been translated into English in a limited run, were reissued in English as Wind/Pinball in 2015
  • Wild Sheep Chase became his first major international success 1985; Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World - a fantasy that was successful with the public and won the prestigious Tanizaki Prize
• Khaled Hosseini


  • Books: The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns, Mountains Echoed - Have been published in over seventy countries and sold more than 40 million copies worldwide
  • He is a Novelist who was known for his vivid depictions of Afghanistan
• The Kite Runner


  • Best selling novel was adapted for the screen in 2007 by David Benioff and turned into a graphic novel in 2011
  • It featured on the New York Times bestseller list for over two years
  • It also won the Border's Original Voices award and the San Francisco Chronicle's Best Book of the Year award