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It is argued here that before the extensive formalization of sharia laws from the late nineteenth century onwards, Islam was prominently influenced by elements of enchantment and mysticism, mirrored in its textual portrayal of passionate and sexual relations. This book's analysis is based on Malay manuscripts and texts about the body, sex, and sexuality. These include religious guidebooks on sexual techniques and etiquette, of which some are translated from the original Arabic or Persian, but almost all of which have been adapted for local Malay relevance. Also analyzed are collections of Malay erotic poetry from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries and the only known female-authored early twentieth-century text on sex and women's sexual pleasure. Over the centuries changing sexual norms and attitudes in the Malay world has disengaged sex and sexuality from being a crucial component of faith and spirituality-gradually receding into the discreet margins of contemporary discourse on gender relations.
In the field of Malay Studies, the traditional artist is among the most mysterious of beings, deeply buried under a tradition that was oral and anonymous. He is more enigmatic now, more than ever before, as he is further alienated from us, by the technological development, the different modes of literary communication, and not the least, by the disappearance of the rural environment that created the artist - all of these factors much influencing his mind. There is no doubt that much as he felt (rasa) the world, he also thought, fikir, about it, about its universe, the powers that governed his life, the community, its values, the arts and what made them please and so on.
The print edition is available as a set of two volumes (9789004104525).
In the field of Nusantaran literary studies, systematic interpretations of individual literary works are still a relatively rare phenomenon. This book shows how such interpretations can be fruitfully produced for traditional Malay literature. Taking his cue from ideas in modern literary theory, anthropology and the study of western medieval literature, the author describes the major conventions of traditional Malay narrative and develops a comprehensive model of traditional Malay poetics, comprising both oral and written traditions. By applying this model to a series of readings of individual works, including heroic epics and Panji romances, the texts come to life.
On the history, themes, genres, manufacture and decoration of Malay manuscripts from Indonesia and Malaysia, based on the collection of the Centre for Malay Manuscripts of the National Library of Malaysia.
"In Victorious Wives, Mulaika Hijjas uses tools drawn from literary criticism and gender studies to look at a previously neglected corpus of Malay literature in a new light. The syair of the Riau Archipelago that are the basis of this book, six nineteenth-century Malay narrative poems, are a unique exception in that they allow access to women's imaginative worlds, and they provide a significant historical backdrop to anthropological accounts of gender in the Malay world in modern times."--P. [4] of cover.
Criticism on Malay literature.