Pamela Finnegan provides a detailed criticism of a major novel written by one of Chile s leading literary figures. She analyzes the symbolism and the use of language in The Obscene Bird of Night, showing that the novel s world becomes an icon characterized by entropy, parody, and materiality. Her study concludes that all linguistic ordering fictionalizes, that the lack of spirituality within the novel s world is symptomatic of language gone stale, and that blindness to this fact leads to dogma or solipsism, each counter-productive to communication and human endeavor. To revive the linguistic...

Chairil Anway (1922-1949) was the primary architect of the Indonesian literary revolution in both poetry and prose. In a few intense years he forged almost ingle-handedly a vital, mature literary language in Bahasa Indonesia, a language which formally came to exist in 1928. Anway led the way for the many Indonesian writers who have emerged during the past fifty years.
This volume contains all that has survived of Anwar s writing. It not longer need the sort of introduction it did soem thirty years ago when Burton Raffel first published English translations of Anwar s work. Raffel now...

The memoirs of Marguerite Schenkhuizen provide an overview of practically the whole of the twentieth century as experienced by persons of mixed Dutch and Indonesian ancestry who lived in the former Dutch East Indies. The memoirs provide vignettes of Indonesian life, both rural and urban, as seen through the eyes of the author first as a girl, then as a wife separated from her husband during the Japanese occupation, finally as an immigrant to the United States after World War II.
This self-portrait gives glimpses of the life of Indos from inside their society, glimpses that are valuable...

These essays examine the multifaceted work of the Central American author whom Latin American literary historians consider precursor of cultural dialogism in poetry and fiction. As poet, essayist, journalist, novelist, and writer of quasi testimonio, Alegria s multiple discourses transgress the boundaries between traditional and postmodern political theories and practices. her work reveals an allegory of relation and negotiation between intelligentsia and subaltern peoples as well as the need for a more socially extensive literature, not exclusive of more elite magical literatures.
The...

Drawing from an extensive list of writings about Indonesian Islam that have appeared over the past fifteen years, Federspiel defines approximately 1,800 terms, phrases, historical figures, religious books, and place names that relate to Islam and gives their Arabic sources.
This dictionary will be indispensable to English speaking students and researchers working in Indonesian or Southeast Asian studies. It will also be useful for scholars working in Bahasa Indonesian, reading texts written about Islam by Indonesian Muslims, as well as for Southeast Asia area scholars generally who are...

What circumstances lead writers in a poor, multi-ethnic and largely illiterate country to produce a literature that both expresses and affects opposition to the regime? Who are these writers? This study examines these and other questions about the literature of resistance in Guatemala, from the days of Estrada Cabrera up to the events of May and June of 1993.
Zimmerman provides the cultural context for the various modes of literary production and analysis, and identifies the currents of opposition in the nation's fiction, poetry, and testimonial writing. He details the cultural politics...

How do economic weakness and dependence influence foreign policy decisions and behavior in third world countries? "Theories in Dependent Foreign Policy" examines six foreign policy theories: compliance, consensus, counterdependence, realism, leader preferences and domestic politics, and each is applied to a series of case studies of Ecuador s foreign policy during the 1980s under two regimes: Osvaldo Hurtado (1981-1984) and his successor Leon Febres Cordero (1984-1988).
Hey shows that Ecuador during this period represented the third world in many ways. It was a new democracy, having just...

Even in the period following the electoral defeat of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) in 1990, the revolution of 1979 continues to have a profound effect on the political economy of Nicaragua. Wright s study, which is based on interviews with people from all walks of life from government and party officials to academics and campesinos as well as on the large volume of literature in both English and Spanish, focuses on the FSLN understanding of the relationships between the state, the party, and mass actors, and the nature of social classes. Wright considers the topics of...

Violence and the Dream People is an account of a little-known struggle by the Malayan government and the communist guerrillas, during the 1948-1960 Malayan Emergency, to win the allegiance of the Orang Asli, the indigenous people of the peninsular Malaya. The author argues that the use of force by both sides in their attempts to woo or coerce the jungle dwellers to support one side or the other in the conflict, caused tensions among the Orang Asli that resulted in counter violence against the interlopers and internecine killings in the tribal groups.
This study challenges the...