Abstract
There are few texts that have become foundational in the literary and cultural traditions of Asia. They may have originated in a particular region at one point in ancient history, but through political infiltration, trade, and the spread of religion, these texts have entered and become incorporated into the cultural imaginations of the different regions throughout the continent. They are altered to become aligned to specific environments and audiences. And their influence continues unabated even into the twenty-first century. For example, the Indian epic The Ramayana of Valmiki (possibly fourth century b.c.) is also an integral part of Southeast Asian literature today. Wu Cheng-en’s Journey to the West (sixteenth century) is an epic novel familiar throughout the Chinese diaspora, while Tales from the Arabian Nights (consolidated by the fifteenth century, with some tales dating to as early as the tenth century) remains the representative narrative of the Middle East. Interestingly, a fundamental feature in all these texts is the predominance of monsters.1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 17.
Glennis Byron, “‘Where Meaning Collapses’: Tunku Halim’s Dark Demon Rising as Global Gothic,” in Asian Gothic: Essays on Literature, Film and Anime, ed. Andrew Hock-Soon Ng (Jefferson, NC: McFarland Press, 2008), 32–45.
Quoted in Donald A. Mackenzie, China and Japan: Myths and Legends (London: Senate, 1923/1994), 54.
David William, Deformed Discourses: The Function of the Monster in Mediaeval Thought and Literature (Montreal-Kingston and London: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996), 81.
F.J. Daniels, “Snake and Dragon Lore of Japan,” Folklore 71, no. 3 (1960): 154.
Richard Kearney, Strangers, Gods and Monsters (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 91.
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, trans. unknown (London: Routledge, 1970/2002), 171.
Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974–1975, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2004), 63.
Alain Grosrichard, “The Case of Polyphemus or, A Monster and Its Mother,” trans. Marina Harss and Sina Nafaji, in Cogito and the Unconscious, ed. Slavoj Žižek (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 118–119.
Laurie Cozad, “Reeling in the Demon: An Exploration into the Category of the Demonized Other as Portrayed in ‘The Journey to the West,’” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 66, no. 1 (1998): 128.
Rob Campany, “Demons, Gods, and Pilgrims: The Demonology of His-yu Chi,” Chinese Literatures: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR) 7, no. 1/2 (1989): 95.
Although there are scholars who argue that the religious element of The Ramayana is a later imposition, Sheldon Pollock provides a strong argument that suggests otherwise. See Sheldon Pollock, “The Divine King in the Indian Epic,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 104, no. 3 (1984): 505–528.
P. Lal, ed. The Bhagavadgita (New Delhi: Roli Books, 1994), 49.
R.K. Narayan, Gods, Demons and Others (London: Heinemann, 1965), 100.
R.K. Narayan, The Ramayana: A Shortened Modern Prose Version of the Indian Epic (London: Penguin, 1972), 80.
More recently, modern Tamil literature has recuperated Ravana as hero, whose defeat in The Ramayana by a treacherous Rama is reflective of the Aryan infiltration into South India at the expense and elimination of Dravidian culture and tradition. For discussion, see K.V. Zvelebil, “Ravana the Great in Modern Tamil Fiction,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 1 (1998): 126–134.
See the ancient text, Jataka: Or, Stories of the Buddha’s Former Births, ed. E.B. Cowell, et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1895–1913). Monkey may be a fictional figure reinscribed into the Buddhist structural order to demonstrate the encompassing and supreme nature of the latter, but in the case of the naga, or dragon, which, prior to the rise of Buddhism, was a local deity throughout various parts of India, it too must be redrawn as a potential threat to the “new religious force” in order for the latter to “[assume] the sacred place and region of an older deity,” while allowing “the older deity to continue in its original power [but] under new authority” (Lowell W. Bloss, “The Buddha and the Naga: A Study in Buddhist Folk Religiosity,” History of Religions 13, no. 1 (1973): 45).
Bernard Faure, The Rhetoric of Immediacy: A Cultural Critique of Chan/Zen Buddhism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 131.
Ahmed K. Al-Rawi, “The Arabic Ghoul and Its Western Transformation,” Folklore 120, no. 3 (2009): 292.
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” in Monster Theory: Reading Culture, ed. Jeffrey J. Cohen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 5.
Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms, trans. Susan Fisher, David Miller, and David Forgacs (London: Verso, 1983).
Margrit Shildrick, Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self (London: Sage, 2002), 67.
Andrew Lang, trans., ed., Tales from the Arabian Nights (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics, 1993), 167.
Peter D. Molan, “Sinbad the Sailor: A Commentary on the Ethics of Violence,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 98, no. 3 (1978): 237.
Songling Pu, Selected Tales of Liaozhai, trans. Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang (Beijing: Panda Books, 1981), 106.
Karl S.Y. Kao, “Projection, Displacement, Introjection: The Strangeness of Liaozhai zhiyi,” in Para-doxes of Traditional Chinese Literature, ed. Eva Hung (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1994), 205.
T. W Johnson, “Far-Eastern Fox Lore,” Asian Folklore Studies 33, no. 1 (1974): 35.
Ismail al-Faruki, “Islam and Art,” Studia Islamica 37 (1973): 95–97.
Edward Madden, “Some Characteristics of Islamic Art,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 33, no. 4 (1975): 423.
Timothy K. Beal, Religion and Its Monsters (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 108.
David Der-Wei Wang, The Monster That Is History: History, Violence, and Fictional Writing in Twentieth-Century China (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004), 263.
Ban Wang, The Sublime Figure of History: Aesthetics and Politics in Twentieth-Century China (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 8.
Ma Jian, Beijing Coma, trans. Flora Dew (London: Chatto & Windus, 2008), 566.
Salman Rushdie, Shame (London: Picador, 1983).
For a more detailed discussion, see Andrew Hock Soon Ng, Interrogating Interstices: Gothic Aesthetics in Postcolonial Asian and Asian American Literature (New York and Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), 48–65.
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2012 Caroline Joan S. Picart and John Edgar Browning
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hock-Soon Ng, A. (2012). Monsters in the Literary Traditions of Asia: A Critical Appraisal. In: Picart, C.J.S., Browning, J.E. (eds) Speaking of Monsters. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137101495_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137101495_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-29597-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-10149-5
eBook Packages: Palgrave Media & Culture CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)