Inter-Asian Literary Relations (ACLA 2025)

What are the textual modes of inter-Asian literary interactions? What are the forms of intertextuality across the literatures and languages of Asia? This seminar aims to examine the inter-Asian network of literary relations that have developed throughout history through various forms of convergences and comparisons. It invites explorations of Inter-Asian relations and transmissions in the field of literature across discrete literary traditions and aesthetic sensibilities. As a starting time frame, the seminar will center on the modern era—roughly from the 19th-century onwards to capture issues of exchange, circulation, migration, and encounter in this vast space that has mediated a dynamic cross-cultural and translational traffic across through a rich range of genres, including epics, story cycles, travelogues, memoirs, poems, and novels. Yet in practice, literary networks within and among Asian regions, especially contacts of the last few centuries, have received much less notice than others. As such, the seminar aims to contribute to transnational studies of the Global South through scholarship on circulation of texts within and among West, East, Central, South, and Southeast Asia.