21ST CENTURY LIT Q2 SEM 1 Prepared By: Christ Neil P.
Gabiosa
REPRESENTATIVE TEXTS AND AUTHORS FROM ASIA
EAST ASIA
CHINA
Du Fu (Tu Fu)
 “The Ballad of the Army Cats” - About
conscription—and with hidden satire that speaks
of the noticeable luxury of the court.
Li Po (Li Bai)
 “Alone and Drinking under the Moon” - Deals
with the ancient social custom of drinking.
Wang Wei
 best poems were inspired by the local
landscape.
Mo Yan
 “Red Sorghum” - Story of the Chinese battling
Japanese intruders as well as each other during
the 1930s. It relates the story of a family in a
rural area in Shandong Province during this
turbulent time
Yu Hua
 “To Live” - Describes the struggles endured by
the son of a wealthy land-owner while historical
events caused and extended by the Chinese
Revolution are fundamentally altering the nature
of Chinese society.
KOREA
Ch’oe Nam-Seon
 "The Ocean to the Youth” - Aimed to produce
cultural reform. He sought to bring modern
knowledge about the world to the youth of
Korea.
Yi Kwang-su
 “The Heartless” - Description of the crossroads
at which Korea found itself, stranded between
tradition and modernity, and undergoing conflict
between social realities and traditional ideals.
Kim Ok
 “The Dance of Agony” - first Korean collection
of translation from Western poetry.
Yun Hunggil
 “Changma” (The Rainy Spell) - Classic novel
on a post-war family with two grandmothers and
their shared grandson.
Pak Kyongni
 T’oji (“The Land”) - Korean’s masterpiece and
internationally acclaimed 21-volume epic novel,
chronicled the violent Korean history from 1897
to 1945.
JAPAN
Abe Kobo (Abe Kimifusa)
 "Tomodachi" (Friends) - Story, with dark
humor, reveals the relationship with the other,
and exposes the peculiarity of human relations
in the present age."
Kimitake Hiraoka (Mishima Yukio)
 “The Temple of the Golden Pavilion” -
Translated into the English language by Ivan
Morris, based on the burning of the Reliquary (or
Golden Pavilion) of Kinkaku-Ji in Kyoto by a
young Buddhist acolyte in 1950
Ryūnosuke Akutagawa
 “Rashomon” - Recounts the encounter
between a servant and an old woman in the
dilapidated Rashōmon, the southern gate of the
then-ruined city of Kyoto, where unclaimed
corpses were sometimes dumped.
Haruki Murakami
 “Hear the Wind Sing” - featured episodes in
the life of an unnamed protagonist and his
friend, the Rat, who hang out at a bar. The
unnamed protagonist reminisces and muses
MIDDLE EAST
about life and intimacy. Murakami’s work has
been translated into more than fifty languages.
Abbas Mahmoud al-Aqqad
 “Abqariyat series” - Seven-book compilation
that covers the life of seven of the most
important Sahabah (the disciples and followers
of Muhammad).
Taha Hussein (The Dean of Arabic Literature)
 “The Days” - Deals with his childhood in a small
village, then his studies in Egypt and France.
Ali Ahmad Said Esber (Adonis)
 “First Poems” and “Leaves in the Wind”
Etgar Keret
 2019 Fly Already (“Glitch at the Edge of the
Galaxy”)
SOUTH AND SOUTHEAST ASIA
INDIA
Kalidasa (Hindu Shakespeare)
 The literary traditions of Southeast Asia possess
the influences of Buddhist, Thai, and English
cultures, especially in Burma literature.
Malaysian and Indonesian literature reflects a
21ST CENTURY LIT Q2 SEM 1 Prepared By: Christ Neil P. Gabiosa
large part of the Sanskrit language and Islam
culture
Rabindranath Tagore (the Bard of Bengal)
 “The English Gitanjali or Song Offerings” -
Volume of poetry which is a collection of
devotional songs to the supreme.
Dhanpat Rai Srivastava (Prem Chand)
 “Godaan” (Cow Donation) - One of the
greatest Hindi novels of modern Indian literature.
Its theme was around the socio-economic
deprivation as well as the exploitation of the
village poor.
Raja Rao
 “The Serpent and the Rope” - A semi-
autobiographical account of the narrator, a
young intellectual Brahman, and his wife seeking
spiritual truth in India, France, and England,
recognized him as one of the fines Indian prose
Stylists.
Rasipuram Krishnaswami Narayan (R. K. Narayan)
 “The Guide” - Based on the fictional town in
South India and describes the transformation of
the protagonist from a tour guide to a spiritual
guide and one of the greatest holy men of India.
Chart Korbjitti
 “Khamphiphaksa (The Judgment)”
Nguyen Du
 “The Tale of Kieu” - Recounts the life, trials,
and tribulations of Thuy Kieu, a beautiful and
talented young woman, who has to sacrifice
herself to save her family. She sells herself into
marriage with a middleaged man, not knowing
that he is a pimp, and is forced into prostitution.
Tengku Amir Hamzah
 “Nyangi Sunyi” - Poem collection considered
the most developed and shows the theme of
God and His relationship to humanity, fate,
dissatisfaction, and escape.
CENTRAL ASIA
Abdullah Qodiriy (Julqunboy)
 O’tgan kunlar (Days Gone By) - First Uzbek
full-length novel.
Mukhtar Auez-uli
 “Abay” - Based on the life and poetry of
Kunanbay-uli.
Chingiz Aytmatov
 “Jamila” - Viewpoint of a fictional character that
tells the story by looking back on his childhood.
The story recounts the love between his new
sister-in-law Jamilya and a local crippled young
man, Daniyar, while Jamilya's husband, Sadyk,
is "away at the front" (as a Soviet soldier during
AFRICA
World War II).
Chinua Achebe
 “Things Fall Apart” - Concerns the traditional
Igbo life at the time of the advent of missionaries
and the colonial government in his homeland.
Wole Soyinka
 “A Dance of the Forests” - Written for the
Nigerian independence celebrations. It parodies
the emerging nation by stripping it of romantic
legend and by showing that the present is no
more a golden age than it was before.
Kofi Awoonor
 “This Earth, My Brother” - Cross between a
novel and a poem. It was told on two levels each
representing a distinct reality. The first level is a
standard narrative which details a day in the life
of an attorney named Amamu. The second level
is a symbol-laden mystical journey filled with
biblical and literary allusions.
Ngungi wa Thiong’o
 “Weep Not, Child” - First major novel in English
by an East African. It deals with the Mau-Mau
Uprising, a war in the British Kenya Colony
(1920–1963) between the Kenya Land and
Freedom Army.
Okot p’ Bitek
 “Song of Lawino (1066), Song of Ocol (1970),
and Two Songs (1971)” - Song of Lawino, a
long poem dealing 20 with the tribulations of a
rural African wife whose husband has taken up
urban life and wishes everything to be
westernized.It was followed by the husband’s
reply, the Song of Ocol.
Nadine Gordimer
 “The Conservationist” - story is a character
study of a successful South African industrial
executive and, by extension, a critique of South
Africa.
Jacques Rabemananjara
 “Les dieux malgaches” - first modern
Malagasy play in French. This play dealt with the
pre-colonial past and with the coup that
unseated King Radama II in 1863.
Es’kia Mphahlele
 “Down Second Avenue” - story of a young
man’s growth into adulthood with penetrating
social criticism of the conditions forced upon
21ST CENTURY LIT Q2 SEM 1 Prepared By: Christ Neil P. Gabiosa
black South Africans by a system of
institutionalized racial segregation.
Thomas Mofolo
 “Chaka” - Historical novel about the story of the
rise and fall of the Zulu king Shaka. Dennis P.
Kunene translated the novel from Sotho to
English.