Lost Times and Untold Tales from the Malay World

Jan van der Putten and Mary Kilcline Cody (Editors)

How did the Komodo dragon influence Hollywood? What do Wanted posters reveal about the Wild Wild East? Was the hapless explorer a martyr to science or a gaseous windbag? Why were colonial officials secret pill poppers? Did bicycles really promote Women's Lib? Who went looking for love in all the wrong places? What do you do at the Get-Rich-Quick-Tree? The answers to these and many other questions are found in the witty, useful, informative, amusing and sometimes amazing stories that make up this collection.

Inspired by the wry yet deeply scholarly prespectives of Australian philologist Ian Proudfoot, the editors of Lost Times and Untold Tales from the Malay World bring together a distinguished group of international scholars who look at calendars and time, royal myths, colonial expeditions, printing, propaganda, theatre, art, Islamic manuscripts, erotic literature, and many other topics from wholly unexpected angles. The book demonstrates the spectacular diversity of scholarship on the Malay World, and shows that offbeat texts can produce fascinating new insights into the past.

Jan van der PUTTEN is Assistant Professor at the Department of Malay Studies, National University of Singapore.
Mary Kilcline CODY is completing her history dissertation Tropical Gothic: The Proudlock Murder Trial, British Malaya, 1911, at the Faculty of Asian Studies, Australian National University, Canberra.

publication year: 2009
428 pages
ISBN: 978-9971-69-454-8  Paperback  US$34.00  S$42.00