Topography of Romantic Love: Journeys, the Fantasy of Love, and Identity Crisis

Dr Fang-Mei Lin (National Taiwan Normal University) Session 9.1: Romancing Chinese Worlds Abstract: Taiwanese author Wu Zhuo-Liu’s novel, Orphan of Asia, was written during the end of WWII and Japanese colonial rule. This celebrated novel, which depicts the hero Taiming’s unsuccessful pursuit of identity among three options: the Japanese, the Chinese, and the Taiwanese, has […]

Girls of Riyadh and Desperate in Dubai : Reading and writing romance in the Middle East

Dr Amy Burge (University of Birmingham) Session 8.4: Muslim and Middle Eastern Romances Abstract: The Middle East has long held a romantic fascination for the west, characterised by the popular sheikh romance. Yet, as myself and others have argued (Burge 2016; Jarmakani 2015; Teo 2012) in these novels Middle Eastern women are often depicted as […]