East Meets West

The 13th International Conference on the Literature of Region and Nation, held at Biwako in Shiga Prefecture, Japan, in the summer of 2010, fully maintained the tradition established in this long-running conference series of bringing together scholars from many countries and many fields of specialisation. Although the conferences have taken place in widely scattered locations, this was the first to be held in an Asian country; and the opportunity this presented of focusing on the cultural links between East and West was taken up enthusiastically by the participants.

Several of the papers explore aspects, sometimes unexpected, of the cultural cross-fertilisation between Japan, or the Orient in general, and the national literatures of the West. Others concentrate on iconic figures from regions of the English-speaking world with strongly-developed individual literary traditions. All the papers have been peer-reviewed, and extensively revised in order to maximise their impact in the written word. The collection demonstrates the stimulating effect of cross-cultural interaction in the field of literary studies of East and West.