2000

DE -- Asia

There have been few recent works that deal comprehensively with this rapidly growing region as a whole. This politically oriented handbook includes welcome contributions from historians, geographers, and literary scholars, and it gives extensive coverage to the region's relations with the rest of the world, especially Europe. The contributors are chiefly German Southeast Asia experts, but many are from other parts of the world, especially the Anglo-Saxon countries.

The work is organized into seven sections: geographic and historical profiles of the individual countries; the region's relations to other regions; religion, literature, and art; and regional economic cooperation, particularly with the other members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). The 38 articles average 15 pages each. The country studies favor political, social, and economic progress over cultural developments. The essays are sparingly illustrated and have little subdivision, although the subject and author indexes compensate for this frugality.

This work differs from volume 7 (on South and Southeast Asia) of the Handbuch der Dritten Welt [Handbook of the Third World] (Bonn, 1994) in that the latter contains only individual country studies. [jpl/ga]
 
 

The three-volume Bibliography of Japan, Series A: Monographs, Journals, Maps, 1477-1985 was compiled between 1990 and 1997 and was reviewed in RREA 4:163, along with volume 1 (1611-1900) of Series B.

The editors' original plan called for completing the entire work (Series A and B) by 1996. Reality has completely overtaken that plan. Up to now it has been possible to publish one volume each year; and Series A has appeared relatively concisely as three volumes in four. However, if one considers the exponential growth of journal-article publishing in the 20th century, it seems problematic to assume that each decade's worth of articles can be covered by just a partial volume, or that three decades can be covered in one volume. Therefore, we probably are looking at a several-years'-long retrospective bibliographic work in progress.

The explosion in the number of published articles should compel the editors to abandon the automatic-permutation indexing system used in Series A. The criteria for including or excluding individual periodicals are not clear, although it appears that a number of popular culture publications are covered. Why the list of periodicals indexed is given in volume 1, part 1, but not in the subsequent volumes, is incomprehensible. [sh/ga]
 
 

The original work covered the years 1980-87, and was published in 1989. Two years later, the first supplement covered 1988-89, with additions for the earlier years 1980-87. The two supplements being reviewed here cover two years at a time, with additions to the earlier publications. The main portion of each work is arranged by author (or title), followed by author, title, and subject indexes. This bibliography is the only one that lists literary works that have been translated from Japanese into German. It is easy to find the Japanese author in the indexes; it is more difficult to gain an overview of translated works. It would be helpful to have an index of translators. [sh/mrh]

Next Section
Previous Section
Table of Contents

Comments, suggestions, or questions
Last update: September 7, 2001 [RD]
© 2005 Casalini libri - VAT no. IT03106600483