Leslie Wong (KCL) - 2021-22 Students
k2146795@kcl.ac.uk

Reception as Method: Adapting the Euro-American Canon in Singapore, South Korea and Japan

My research will consider creative works from Singapore, Japan and South Korea that adapt or appropriate from the Euro-American literary canon via Graeco-Roman antiquity and/or Victorian literature. I aim to discover how practices of contemporary adaptation and reception can envision an alternative dynamic between the Far East and the Euro-American West that is not defined by either colonial identification or postcolonial resentment.

I will draw upon scholarship in classical reception studies and adaptation studies to construct my analytical framework, whilst being guided by the Asia as Method approach to overcome the Eurocentric biases of these fields. Texts I am considering include Park Chan-wook’s film The Handmaiden (2016), the Japanese visual novel The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles (2021) and the Singaporean novel The Gatekeeper (2016).

Primary supervisor: Dr Justine McConnell, KCL
Secondary supervisor: Dr Victor Fan, KCL

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