Volume 4, Issue 1, November 2011

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Letter from the Editor

Welcome to Volume 4, no. 1 of Transnational Literature.

In this issue, we once again offer a wealth of essays, stories, poems and reviews from writers and scholars all over the world, from Canada to Lithuania to Hong Kong. It is particularly exciting to include a special feature on 'Literary Transculturations', guest-edited by Jena Habegger-Conti of Bergen, Norway. The articles collected in this feature originated in the inaugural conference of the Nordic Network for Literary Transculturation Studies (NNLTS), 'Post/Colonial and Transcultural: Contending Modernities, Presaging Globalisation', held in Riga, Latvia in September 2010. I would like to thank Jena for all her hard work organising this feature, and her meticulous editing. It has been a great pleasure to work with her.

Other essays in this broad-ranging issue include Nicolas Birns on Patrick White, Md. Rezaul Haque on Raja Rao, Diana Jovaišienė on the Lithuanian writer Herkus Kunčius, Holly Martin on Chinese American writer Ha Jin, and Umme Salma on Alexander Pope. There is a review essay by Dorothy Driver of the book Trauma, Memory, and Narrative in South Africa: Interviews, two interviews with authors, Sandra Rota's conversation with Altaf Tyrewala and my own with Adelaide author Amy T. Matthews, and a translation by Mohammad A. Quayum of a fascinating 1903 essay by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, exhorting Bengal's women to throw off the chains of their oppression.

For the first time this issue, we've included a section of News and Views, with my report from the First Fiji Literary Festival. We invite short, newsy articles, or letters to the editor, to include in this section in future issues.

As usual we are publishing a good crop of creative writing – poems, short stories and life writing. I would like to thank our new poetry editor, Debra Zott, and Gay Lynch, our new creative and life-writing editor, for their advice and assistance with this part of the journal. I'm also pleased to announce that Emily Sutherland will be joining the editorial team from the next issue.

I would like to acknowledge the essential contribution made by the anonymous peer reviewers, without whom an academic journal cannot function, but who by the very nature of the process may not be named.

And as always, there are dozens of book reviews of works ranging from poetry to history, from fiction to literary criticism and travel. I hope you enjoy the breadth of views in this truly transnational issue of Transnational Literature.

Gillian Dooley, General Editor

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