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Conversion of the tribes: societal antecedents and the growth of Singaporean poetry *
Author(s) -
THUMBOO EDWIN
Publication year - 1990
Publication title -
world englishes
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.6
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1467-971X
pISSN - 0883-2919
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-971x.1990.tb00256.x
Subject(s) - relation (database) , centrality , poetry , politics , sociology , aesthetics , colonialism , social psychology , psychology , literature , political science , law , art , mathematics , combinatorics , database , computer science
When discussing the writer's self, it is vitally important that we pay attention to questions of history and politics. This paper seeks to examine the individual self of the writer and the growth of Singaporean poetry in relation to the determining pressures of the past and the present. The centrality of the colonial experience and the recovery from the experience in terms of the political, economic, intellectual and psychological dimensions are themes crucial to this paper. The author examines how the poet seeks self‐definition as he interacts with the dialect, the vision, the social and cultural forces that surround him or her, in a challenging and creative fashion. This paper underlines the importance of seeking to understand the individual self in relation to the collective self.