Towards a cosmopolitan poetics: the poetry of Wong May & Boey Kim Cheng

Abstract

National identity and the authenticity of a writer¿s cultural and geographical origins have been emphasized in much of the analysis of postcolonial literature. This thesis investigates what happens as writers travel beyond their ¿native¿ countries and choose to disrupt the familiar patterns of exile, nostalgia and sentimentalism and de-emphasize a sense of rootedness to a specific cultural origin. Through close reading of the poetry of Wong May and Boey Kim Cheng through the lenses of familial connections, and travel and migration, I explore how both achieve different degrees of cosmopolitanism that have led to difficulties in critical studies of their work. Wong and Boey show us the possibilities of a new world writing which is not circumscribed by national or colonial rules and instead goes beyond more insular aims of building national identity to become individual, eclectic and mobile.