Waiyee Loh
Assistant Professor of World Literature
Department of English
Kanagawa University, Japan
Book Project
Empire of Culture: Neo-Victorian Narratives in the Global Creative Economy (forthcoming from SUNY Press)
My first book extends my PhD dissertation to examine representations of Victorian Britain in a wide array of contemporary texts and practices, both “literary” and “popular,” from four geographical locations: Britain, the United States, Japan, and Singapore. By analysing cultural materials ranging from A. S. Byatt’s novel Possession and its Hollywood film adaptation to Lolita fashion and the Lady Victorian manga series, Empire of Culture draws on contemporary narratives that look back on Victorian Britain to uncover the trans-imperial politics of cultural commodity production, export, and consumption in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Fifty Shades of Grey
"Spreading the Word: What Fifty Shades of Grey Means for World Literature" (published in C21 Literature)
I have recently published a journal article on the Fifty Shades trilogy, which derives from a teaching assignment for the "Modern World Literatures" course I taught at the University of Warwick in 2015/2016. How does the global popularity of Fifty Shades complicate our understanding of World Literature as “literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin,” and which are “actively present within a literary system beyond that of its original culture” (Damrosch 2003)? By applying the practice of close reading to a novel few would call “literature,” this article uses Fifty Shades as a premise to rethink existing paradigms in the field of World Literature.
I have also published an op-ed piece on Fifty Shades for JSTOR Daily. "Fifty Shades of Affective Labour for Capital" was published on 17 January 2018 to coincide with the release of the Fifty Shades Freed movie adaptation.