Storied Island

Javanese literature is one of the world’s richest and most unusual literary traditions yet it is little known today outside of Java, Indonesia, and a handful of western universities. With its more than a millennium of documented history, its complex interactions over the centuries with literature written in Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, Malay and Dutch, its often symbiotic relationship with the performing arts of puppetry and dance, and its own immense creativity and insight, this vastly understudied literature offers a lens to understanding Java’s fascinating world as well as human ingenuity more broadly. The essays in this volume, Storied Island: New Explorations in Javanese Literature, take a fresh look at questions and themes pertaining to Java’s literature, employing new theoretical and methodological lenses.

Ronit Ricci (PhD in Comparative Literature, University of Michigan 2006) is Professor of Asian Studies and Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is also affiliated with the Australian National University. She has published widely on Javanese and Malay manuscript cultures, the Sri Lanka Malays, translation, and exile in colonial Asia. She is currently leading the ERC-funded project Textual Microcosms: A New Approach in Translation Studies, focused on interlinear translations from the Indonesian-Malay world.

“Each chapter of this book is a call to action. They prove beyond any doubt that in-depth study of manuscript texts is essential to understanding Javanese culture and that the investment of time and effort in doing so will be rewarded many times over. These texts help us to challenge the tired old generalizations that have spread from outdated scholarship to shape popular notions about Javanese culture. They compel us to think more expansively about what a text is and to start describing in detail how variant versions of similar stories are intertwined to form complex traditions like the Centhini, the Ambiya, or the Panji tales.”
– Wayan Jarrah Sastrawan, Southeast Asia Research, 32.2 (July 2024)