Summary:The Tale of Kieu, a verse novel written by Nguyen Du in 1813, has long
been known to Southeast Asian scholars as the supreme incarnation of 19th century Vietnamese
literature. This essay argues that Kieu deserves to be considered one of the masterpieces
of world literature, the equal of Pushkin's immortal Eugene Onegin and the verse classics
of Goethe and Schiller. Themes include nation-state formation in East Asia, mercantilism and colonialism, symbolic
capital and literati culture, national realism and national allegory.
Download: Rich Text Format or MS Word (my early, clunky version of PDF doesn't
code for Vietnamese diacritics).
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