Artists in The Floating World: The Prose Fiction of Lee Kok Liang, Lloyd Fernando, K. S. Maniam and Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Abstract

This essay provides an overview of four of the major writers of anglophone Malaysian literature since Malaysian independence in order to assess the supposed "evolution" of the thematic concerns within these texts. The anglophone literature of Malaysia has moved beyond traditional colonial/postcolonial binaries and is now as much represented through a prism of diaspora and transnationalism. While such a position provides fresh opportunities for a reinterpretation of Malaysian history and society and its broader relationship to the forces of globalization in terms of the perceived dissolution of national and cultural boundaries in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, it also carries with it the associated perils of accepting transition (or impermanence) as an oxymoronic, permanent state. The essay examines the role of each of the authors, from a biographical and textual perspective, in addressing these issues and finds that while a guarded resolution may be seen to take place for those authors whose work and lives have been predominantly located in Malaysia (Lee Kok Liang, Lloyd Fernando and K. S. Maniam), the prose fiction of Shirley Geok-lin Lim indicates progress on a transnational basis but regression on a more, localized Malaysian scale