Lost Times and Untold Tales from the Malay World

Front Cover
Jan van der Putten, Mary Kilcline Cody
NUS Press, 2009 - History - 396 pages
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.
 

Contents

Significant Time Myths and Power in the Javanese Calendar
1
How Surakarta was Founded on the Wrong Day
17
An Excursion to Javas GetRichQuick Tree
33
Lord Hunting Tiger and Malay Learning in Japan Before the War
54
A Paler Shade of White
82
The Perils of Propaganda
97
Wanted
114
In Search of Fatimah
129
A Social History
198
Faust does Nusantara
227
Finding Love in Hikayat Raja Kulawandu
241
The Thread of Eroticism in Faridah Hanom An Early Malay
257
Sayyid Uthman 18221914 of
283
The Translation of Matthes
304
Was the Mousedeer Peranakan? In Search of Chinese Islamic
319
From Bustan to Taman
339

Reflections on the Mysticism of Shams alDin alSamatrai
148
Muhammad Yusuf Ahmad and
164
Fr Pécot and the Earliest Catholic Imprints in Malay
177
Bibliography
357
Contributors
384
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