Introduction

In: Storied Island
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Abstract

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 literatures 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 Introduction briefly explores the history of the field. It also introduces the essays in this volume which take a fresh look at questions and themes pertaining to Java’s literature, employing new theoretical and methodological lenses.

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 literatures 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 take a fresh look at questions and themes pertaining to Java’s literature, employing new theoretical and methodological lenses.

Javanese is the language of the largest Muslim ethnolinguistic group in the world and the largest ethnic group in Southeast Asia and Indonesia, currently spoken by approximately 100 million people. Javanese literature is typically divided into three broad periods: Old Javanese, Middle Javanese, and Modern Javanese, the first and last of which are somewhat better defined although their borders, too, remain porous and imprecise. Modern Javanese works, the focus of this volume, are defined as those containing Arabic loanwords, and written in indigenous, non-Sanskritic meters and in prose from the sixteenth century onwards, a period which marked Java’s gradual transition to Islam (Pigeaud 1967). These works encompass a wide range of topics and genres including, among others, historical narratives ranging from the local to the cosmic, mystical poetry, didactic literature for princes and women, prophecies, meditations on language, tales of adventure and romance, and novels (Arps and Gallop 1991; Quinn 1992; Florida 2000; Saktimulya 2005).

Modern Javanese literature also encompasses legal and religious treatises, some of which were written in the form of interlinear translation, with an Arabic original appearing widely spaced on the page and translated word for word into Javanese, opening a window to the lexical and grammatical decisions made by translators and to the emergence of particular intellectual traditions (Umam 2013; Ricci 2016). Javanese texts of the modern period were written in the traditional, India-derived script (known as aksara Jawa), in a modified Arabic script (pegon or gundhul), and in Romanized form, thus raising questions about script-related choices, hierarchies, and affiliations (Ricci 2015). The majority of extant pre-twentieth century Javanese literature is in the form of manuscripts, kept in royal repositories, state libraries, and private collections in Indonesia, as well as in libraries in Leiden, London, and elsewhere. The vast majority of this literature has never been subject to scholarly attention.

The modern academic study of Javanese as it developed from the early nineteenth century onwards in the metropole and the colony – The Netherlands and Java, respectively – was firmly grounded in the field of philology. Javanese texts were studied and edited with emphasis put on questions of dating, provenance, authorship, and content (Raffles 1817; Pijper 1924; Hooykaas 1955). The issue of originality often emerged: since many of the texts studied seemed familiar yet different to European scholars reading them – prime examples include Javanese retellings of the Indian epics, Ramayana and Mahabharata, and the Sĕrat Ambiya, tales of the early Muslim prophets – Javanese authors were often seen as interpolators or incapable translators, deviating from the “authentic” texts they were transmitting. Only gradually did an understanding develop that such “borrowed” works did not express an inability to translate “faithfully” or a disregard for content or style. Rather, their retelling on Java represented significant processes of adaptation, localization, and creativity that in turn spoke to broader societal and cultural transformations, including the Islamization of the Indonesian archipelago and responses to a growing European presence and colonialism. Recent scholarship has thus expanded the range of questions asked and disciplinary perspectives taken, seeking to understand Javanese literature on its own terms, as well as to explore its historical, religious, and artistic contexts (Florida 1995; Behrend 1999; Ricklefs 1998; Ricci 2011; Arps 2016; Bogaerts 2016; Ming and van der Molen 2018; Sugahara and van der Molen 2018; Wieringa 2019; Sastrawan 2020; Day 2021; Meyer 2021).

Despite such attempts and the interest several prominent mid–late twentieth-century intellectuals took in Java (including Benedict Anderson and Clifford Geertz, who made seminal contributions to political science and anthropology, respectively, with their writings on Java), the field of Javanese Studies has been gradually shrinking. One dimension crucial to understanding the field’s predicament in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is the rise of Bahasa Indonesia as the unifying language of the Indonesian independence movement and the post-colonial state which, although considered a remarkable success on many fronts, has significantly marginalized the role played by Javanese in the private and public spheres in Indonesia and beyond. On the other hand, large-scale digitization projects – like the ones taking place at the British Library, the Endangered Archives Programme, Leiden University library and DREAMSEA – and the unparalleled database sastra.org, mean that Javanese manuscripts are more widely available for reading and research than ever before.

This volume is based on work conducted by an international group of scholars over ten months during a residency at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies (2018–19). The official title of the project was “New Directions in the Study of Javanese Literature,” but more casually, and reflecting how unexpected the location of carrying out research on this particular topic seemed, we came to be known as the “Java in Jerusalem” group. Those in the field of Javanese Studies are often quite alone in their respective institutions, therefore the opportunity to hold joint reading sessions and seminars and to engage in daily hallway conversations about this or that idea, a word that defied translation, or a missing historical detail, felt most welcome. The productive exchange of ideas, the many conversations we had, and the collaborative spirit of those months shaped the following pages, as well as the group’s already-published Reader, a collection of selected passages from a range of Javanese texts with translation and brief essays (Bogaerts and Day 2021).1

Storied Island has three aims: first, to present analyses of texts not studied to date, a basic but indispensable prerequisite for our ability to better generalize and theorize; second, to reassess texts studied by earlier generations of scholars while employing in their analysis theoretical paradigms previously untapped in the field and knowledge from adjoining areas including religious studies, performance, and cultural studies; third, and based on the first two goals, to broadly rethink major dimensions of the field, including periodization, contextualization, literary categorizations, and interpretive methods.2

Past volumes on Javanese literature, including the indispensable scholarship of Zoetmulder (1974, 1995), Poerbatjaraka (1957) and Pigeaud (1967–70), tended to be arranged chronologically and offered synopses of multiple works. While certainly standing on the shoulders of our predecessors and owing them a great debt for their groundbreaking, meticulous and erudite writings, the present volume does not follow that path, but rather engages with texts using particular theoretical or thematic perspectives. It is exploratory in nature, aiming to expand the horizons of Javanese studies in new directions.

The chapters are diverse in the sources and methods they employ but also speak to one another, with key themes emerging, several of which will be mentioned here. A reconsideration of Islam as represented textually across time and genre is common to many of the chapters (Ricklefs, Day, Florida, Arps, Sugahara, Ricci, Meyer, Bogaerts). In fact, almost all authors touch upon this theme in one way or another, validating Ricklefs’ overarching claim in chapter 1 of a paradigm shift in how Islam is understood within Javanese studies; several chapters present new insights on, and interpretations of, Javanese writing genres and the possible links amongst them. For example, what did it mean to write a “life story” in Javanese? Can the Sĕrat Babad Nitik and Ambiya texts be viewed as forms of biography (of Sultan Agung and the prophets, respectively), and can they be considered as precedents for Raden Sasrakusuma’s late nineteenth century autobiography? Chapters on epic (Arps), the shifting definitions of the Sĕrat Cĕnthini (Day), suluk (Florida, Meyer), pitutur (Sugahara), and “tales” (as in Panji Tales, van der Molen) engage with generic questions and with the challenges of “relocating” genre into a new context in which it is discussed in English – with its categories and historical echoes – rather than in Javanese.

Furthermore, there are reassessments of important works in the field, both primary sources (Day and Florida on the Cĕnthini, Arps on Caritanira Amir, Ricci on Sĕrat Ambiya, Meyer on the Seh Malaya) and secondary ones (Sugahara’s rereading of Drewes’ analysis of a sixteenth century text, Ricklefs on a range of early scholarship), as well as engagements with texts that have been little or barely studied to date (Bogaerts on Sĕrat Babad Nitik, van der Molen on Panji Paniba, Wieringa on Lalakone Raden Sasrakusuma); some chapters engage with textual topics and dimensions hardly addressed thus far, including affect (Arps, with a broad range of emotional representation discussed also by Bogaerts and Ricci), sex (Day, Wieringa), scientific technology (Meyer), and political allegory (van der Molen, Bogaerts); the chapters by Arps, Day, Bogaerts and Florida bring out the profound importance of vocal and aural dimensions of reading, of texts’ performative incarnations, and of Javanese texts’ relationships to the art forms of music, dance, painting and puppetry, highlighting how texts are often only “fully realized” if these dimensions are taken into consideration; the ongoing presence of Old Javanese sensibilities in an Islamic Java (Arps, van der Molen) is an important theme that awaits much further research.

Temporal and spatial dimensions take various forms in the works explored. One way in which Javanese texts speak to the past, present, and sometimes the future, is by employing the same figures, or echoes or shadows of these figures’ lives, in texts inscribed at different moments in time. For an example, we might look to the well-known story about Sunan Kalijaga, a prominent Javanese wali, taking part in building the first Javanese mosque in Demak and orienting the mosques in Demak and Mecca towards one another. A link between Sunan Kalijaga and an important Muslim figure, going backwards in time, is found in Ricci’s chapter depicting an Ambiya episode in which the building of the first Meccan mosque by nabi Ibrahim echoes Sunan Kalijaga’s role in the erection of the Demak mosque: in both cases a slab of stone, or pillar, was missing in order to complete the task and it was ultimately found; then, moving forward rather than backward in time from Kalijaga’s era, Meyer in her chapter asks how the episode of Sunan Kalijaga calibrating the two foundational mosques continues to reverberate in Ahmad Dahlan’s twentieth century biography, when he led a movement to re-align the kiblat of Javanese Muslims in prayer. These different yet linked episodes point to overlapping temporalities – and also to the figure of Sunan Kalijaga as a kind of pillar within Javano-Islamic literary and cultural tradition, holding up connections to the early Islamic past and also futuristic ones to Indonesia’s Muhammadiyah.

The writing of the Sĕrat Babad Nitik in Yogyakarta in the 1870s was commissioned by the Ratu Agĕng to retell the life of Sultan Agung, a great king and warrior of the past, while directing his example at her son, the future ruler Hamĕngku Buwana VII; in the Panji Paniba a tale with elements adopted from the ancient Ramayana epic speaks to contemporary political circumstances and imagines, or prophesizes, a better future for Java.

An attunement to space is found in many of the texts and the analyses that accompany them: Raden Sasrakusuma’s movement along the road of career and family, the travels of wandering santri across Java’s landscape depicted in the Cĕnthini, Amir Hamza’s many adventurous journeys, Sultan Agung’s movement between palace and war and the abode of Nyai Lara Kidul, Queen of the Southern Seas, Panji’s search for the princess and the juxtaposition of the “here” of Java and the “there” of Makassar. There is also the theme of an inner space of the heart of the one traversing the path, touched by Sufi songs (Florida), and an inner Mecca that requires no distant travels but only a believer’s true realization (Meyer). A central spatial question, tying back to the theme of Islamization, can be phrased as “where is Java?,” a question that seems self-evident but which several of the chapters show is not so, by engaging with Javanese concerns about center and periphery, marginality, localization, and the layered spaces of Javanese writing, memory, and imagination.

There are three related, yet not entirely overlapping, aspects of many of the texts discussed in this volume which often seemed to take center stage in reading sessions and discussions. First, Javanese narrative texts tend to be expansive and exuberant: in descriptive detail, in the number of characters, in affect, and of course, in the employment of language. The latter exuberance comes through in translated passages scattered throughout the volume, many of them rendered in English for the first time. Textual expansion and improvisation constitute yet another way in which writing in Java is linked with the arts, as Day aptly points out, reading two Cĕnthini scenes within the framework of gamelan music: “What happens in the two vignettes, to choose another analogy, is like the ciblon section of a gĕndhing, when the intervals between the notes played by instruments that carry the basic melody expand, allowing various other instruments to fill those sonic spaces with creative, often highly individualistic improvisations on the basic melody.”

Second, there seems to be a certain interchangeability of characters, tropes, and roles in Javanese literature of different periods and genres, as if there was a vast pool of motifs somewhere on which poets could draw, whether writing a Panji tale, a story of the Islamic prophets or heroes, a Nitik text, another Ramayana, a book of Islamic instruction, a suluk, or a memoire. Third, the echoes or shadows brought about by such movement of characters and scenes and tropes creates a web of connections we usually call “intertextuality” – but the term seems by now overused, worn and insufficient. In some ways, this phenomenon seems at present almost trivial to us, and it has been commented on extensively in many contexts, but is there more we can say? There is a phenomenon here that pervades the texts, and performances, that brings them alive across time, genre, and religion, whether or not we have the precise word to capture what it is.

Very briefly, several more themes that are explored by the following chapters are authority and power across periods and contexts as represented and claimed within texts; Java in the “long nineteenth century”: palace, pĕsantren, school, village, forest; considering the roles of characters, especially minor ones, and characterization; locating and situating texts in their relation to particular places; and, to express many of these more broadly, thinking anew about relationships: between word and image, between major and minor characters, between text and place, between Java and Indian civilization, Java and the Middle East, between text and generic classification, between the reader and the textual world she enters through slow, close reading.

What has been suggested here does not exhaust the range of themes that emerge in and across chapters. We hope readers will find points of interest and connections that are meaningful to them as they travel the pages ahead.

Finally, as is the case with every piece of writing, the current authors are located in the present moment, with its particular concerns and blind spots. Such concerns might include, among other topics, the history of emotions, global Islamic studies, microhistory and the study of everyday life, performance studies, and gender. Our blind spots may be even more pronounced than those of scholars working in other fields because so few conduct research on Javanese literature, both in Indonesia and elsewhere, and many, many texts remain to be studied. Be that as it may, there is no end point to studying Javanese literature. Rather, the subject of inquiry itself changes as time goes by, examined through the eyes of researchers and students and other audiences whose lives are grounded in particular circumstances. One dimension of studying Javanese literature is studying how it was studied in different periods and places, and why, and how the changing emphases (e.g., past discussions of “interpolation,” “syncretism,” “Indianization”; how the Cĕnthini has been studied and classified over time) have shaped the knowledge and ways of seeing we have inherited. Breaking free of those, or even adding nuance and depth, are no less challenging than reading intricate Javanese verses. Therefore, this volume seeks both to offer new insights that have become possible in our own day and age and to remain aware that we, too, are not offering a definitive, omniscient vantage point. The authors aim to provide new directions for further exploration and analysis within the field and also beyond it, as the themes, methodologies, and theoretical angles presented in the essays are relevant to scholars working on similar questions in other regions and cultural contexts. To this end, the chapters were written with both specialist and non-specialist readers in mind and the volume includes an extended glossary of Javanese terms. Most of all, the authors hope the volume will be received as a starting point to further debate, conversation, research, and reflection on the remarkable literature of the storied island of Java.

1 The Chapters in Brief

The opening chapter of the volume is by the late Merle Ricklefs, whose life’s work on Javanese history and literature embodies (among other things) the importance of attunement to the Javanese sources and what they convey about the past, encouraging an openness to paradigm shifts, including in relation to a question as fundamental to Javanese studies as the process of Islamization. Reminding us how powerfully the interests and blind spots of the present shape our views of the past, Ricklefs traces the seminal change in the field from the legacy of viewing Islam as marginal to Javanese culture to the more recent interpretation of considering it as a topic of major significance in the history of the Javanese. The chapter sets the stage for a theme that runs through the majority of the volume’s chapters, which is how Islam – its history and contemporary manifestations, its pull, major figures, poetic and pietistic traditions – is represented and engaged with textually across time and genre.

The authors of the next two chapters, Tony Day and Nancy Florida, return to the Sĕrat Cĕnthini, a text read and studied by generations of scholars, to examine it from new angles. Both note that the Cĕnthini has been one of the most admired, yet little read works of nineteenth century Javanese literature, thus touching on the larger question in contemporary Java of little actual engagement with Javanese texts, combined with a sense of awe and particular ideas about what such literature contains and means. Day’s focus in chapter 2 is on aspects of the Cĕnthini’s literary composition. Curiously, these have been for the most part neglected in the scholarship, which has tended to view the long narrative poem as an encyclopedic work on all things Javanese despite its linguistic and literary richness. Day pays close attention to characterization, especially to “minor characters.” The study of characterization, as the chapter shows, is key to our understanding of religious and political thinking in early nineteenth century Java as well as to gaining a better grasp of how literary narratives in Java have been created and what they mean. Furthermore, Day suggests, their study will make it possible to situate the poem as literature on a continuum extending from ancient Javanese kakawin to novels written by Javanese authors in both Javanese and Indonesian in the modern period.

Nancy Florida, in chapter 3, begins with a depiction of the Muslim cleric and artist Mustofa Bisri’s painting of the controversial dangdut dancer Inul, surrounded by a circle of ulama performing zikir (remembrance of God), wondering if he was inspired by “memory shadows” of earlier, now mostly erased practices of the devotional performances of suluk in song and dance in rural Java that combined ideas about and practices of mind and body that were believed to advance man’s path to God. Closely reading several passages from the Cĕnthini that depict such scenes, Florida highlights the centrality of the idea of embodied spirit to Javanese Sufis at the time and shows how crucially important within the Javanese world of Islam was the cultural element, with the suluk understood as the best way to reach and to touch the believers’ hearts. She also argues for the need to finally put aside views about Javanese Islam as being “lesser,” “marginal,” or “partial,” ideas that have been powerful and influential for far too long.

In chapter 4, Bernard Arps takes a new look at the Islamic epic of Amir Hamza which constituted the major epic of Islam in Asia until the early twentieth century. The epic, which was widely popular around the Java Sea, was studied by earlier scholars including van Ronkel and Poerbatjaraka, but has received little attention since. The focus of the chapter is on what Arps terms the “Hamza Affect,” an overarching tendency in this epic (but one that can be detected also in other South and Southeast Asian epics) to prioritize feelings, emotions, moods, and sentiments as forces that structure the epic and propel it forward. The emphasis on affect is not limited to written texts but is central also to performance, and the chapter exemplifies this fact by offering depictions of three Amir Hamza puppetry performances over recent decades. By bringing together written sources and performative traditions, Arps highlights the interconnectedness of these realms to Javanese culture, ones that too often have been studied in isolation.

Yumi Sugahara in chapter 5 revisits a classic in the field of Javanese studies, Drewes’ 1969 published text and translation of one of the earliest surviving Javanese manuscripts, to which he gave the title “The Admonitions of Seh Bari.” The text, previously published by Schrieke in 1916 and attributed to the famous wali Sunan Bonang, is a valuable source of information on Islamic doctrine in sixteenth century Java. Acknowledging the challenges of trying to contextualize such an early text and the many gaps in our understanding of the period, Sugahara nonetheless explores it in an attempt to shed light on several points of doctrine apparently current at the time, to consider the meaning of the text’s attribution to Sunan Bonang, as well as to raise broader questions about the use of the term “Sufism” in our studies of early Islam in Java.

In chapter 6 Ronit Ricci investigates one of Java’s most popular (yet again, like the Cĕnthini and Hamza epic, little studied) textual traditions, the Sĕrat Ambiya. These “Tales of the Prophets,” which appear in numerous manuscripts inscribed in palaces and villages, in poetry and prose and in various scripts, depict the lives of the many prophets of Islam leading up to Muhammad, the Seal of the Prophets. In the chapter Ricci examines two manuscripts produced in the mid-nineteenth century Javanese pĕsantren milieu, focusing on scenes in which, she suggests, the life of an Ambiya figure echoes with that of a Javanese wali. Thus, for example, the episode of nabi Ibrahim constructing the first mosque in Mecca shares much with the well-known story of Sunan Kalijaga’s role in the erection of Java’s first mosque in Demak. Hence the chapter points to a “wali-Ambiya interface” through which two great Islamic traditions – those of the walis and nabis – were intertwined and mutually constituted in major Javano-Islamic pedagogical settings.

In chapter 7, Verena Meyer asks what thinking about kiblat alignments (turning towards Mecca in prayer) in Java, by two figures as different as Sunan Kalijaga and Muhammadiyah’s founder Ahmad Dahlan, tells us about understandings of religion and space? About perceptions of center and periphery? Drawing on historian of religion Jonathan Z. Smith’s claim that religious understandings of place are characterized by a conflict between two opposing senses, a “locative” and a “utopian” vision of the world, she considers, through a reading of the story of Seh Malaya, how the Javanese have negotiated their distance, geographic and otherwise, from the traditional center of the Muslim world, and how the view from the margins, so to speak, in fact shows that the meaning of Mecca, of the center, is not always self-evident, not always the same. “Where is Mecca” and “where is Java” are questions to be asked in tandem. Such an understanding, Meyer suggests, complicates and even collapses the difference between the two senses of space and the dichotomies of center and periphery, inner and outer, here and there.

Chapter 8 is dedicated to Els Bogaerts’ study of the Sĕrat Babad Nitik corpus, depicting the life and deeds of the seventeenth century Sultan Agung, another Javanese textual tradition that has yet to receive due attention. Bogaerts’ emphasis is on the text’s modes of referentiality (in particular the use of credible, trustworthy sources) and their multiple aims. She shows that these modes are used to build credence so as to convince the audiences of the stories of Sultan Agung’s prominence, to claim the authenticity of the tales, and to authorize the telling. They also demonstrate that the representation of the past in the Sĕrat Babad Nitik is based on tradition, both oral and written. Bogaerts makes the point that there are different modes of listening to Javanese texts and that familiarity of the audience with many of the stories woven into the Nitik likely led to a particular kind of attention paid. Further to this, she expands on the importance of the vocal and aural dimensions of reading, its performative aspects, and the way a text only fully comes through if these aspects are taken into account. The chapter also considers the relationship between the choice of past events and figures to appear in the text and contemporary events, highlighting the way Javanese texts often speak both to the past and present, as well as the future.

In chapter 9, Willem van der Molen presents a little-known Panji tale, the early nineteenth century Panji Paniba, which includes a scene highly reminiscent of the one depicting Sita’s desire for the golden deer in the Ramayana (in the Panji Paniba the deer is replaced by a dove, Sita by princess Sekartaji). Taking this scene as his point of departure, van der Molen asks to what ends did the Javanese poet insert a variation of the famous scene, what might it have signified to the audience? Step-by-step, by way of elaborating on particular characters and scenes, the chapter puts forward an argument for the Panji world of figures and events representing in fictional form contemporary tensions and developments in colonial Java, ones that could not be expressed openly by the Javanese under tightening Dutch rule. This interpretation, in which, for example, a Javano-Makassarese war stands for Javano-Dutch enmity, points to Javanese texts of the period as sites of resistance and the imagining of alternative futures.

Last but not least, Edwin Wieringa in chapter 10 introduces the so-called autobiography of the writer and schoolteacher Raden Sasrakusuma (b. 1848). “So-called” because rethinking generic classifications and how, why, and by whom they have been employed in the study of Javanese literature, is central to Wieringa’s discussion and with it, the even wider question of whether “literature” has been employed far too broadly for Javanese writing. Wieringa stresses the need to seek the models such categorization was based on, and to ask how such models were tied to provenance and collecting histories. As he notes, it cannot be emphasized enough that we only know about Sasrakusuma’s reminiscences (written as a private family document) because one Dutchman, namely Hendrik Kraemer, happened to be interested in it. This makes crystal clear the power of the few, sometimes of just a single well-known scholar (and outsider) to determine an entire tradition, especially in a small field of study. The question of the naming of literary categories is also raised, beginning with the phrase lalakone Raden Sasrakusuma, in which the word lĕlakon, which possesses a semantic range that includes “life aim,” “role,” moral responsibility, and “destiny,” is translated as “biography” or “autobiography,” pointing to the challenges of naming, defining, and understanding writing categories in translation. Wieringa’s analysis of Sasrakusuma’s text and of its reading by earlier scholars also bring out an oft-employed overemphasis on “European influence” and highlights the challenge of disentangling what was indeed such and what just looked that way, e.g., Sasrakusuma’s use of very complex time reckoning systems suggests, contrary to popular scholarly belief, that caring about time was not a new and European idea adopted by the Javanese. The chapter thus challenges scholars in the present to balance a reliance on the work of our predecessors with a striving to make histories of collecting, naming, and classifying more accessible and transparent for the sake of more nuanced knowledge.

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Digital Repositories

Sastra.org

https://www.sastra.org/

Endangered Archive Programme

https://eap.bl.uk/.

DREAMSEA

https://dreamsea.co/.

1

The Reader’s emphasis is on close readings of textual selections from a range of Javanese writings, with each contribution presenting a text and translation with short commentary, while the essays in this volume encompass more expansive explorations into many of those same texts, and others, considering method and theory and links among texts.

2

I wish to acknowledge the research group members who were unable to write chapters but whose contributions to the group’s work were significant: George Quinn, Siti Muslifah, and the late Opan Safari.

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