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Dr Andrew Ng Hock Soon

  B.Ed (Hons) (TESL, University Malaya)
M.A (Literature, University of Malaya)
Ph.D. (Literature, Western Australia)
- Lecturer in Literature


I am interested in rethinking the Gothic as a multicultural aesthetics in order to subject it to refinement, even transformation, by texts outside the “Western” canon. My research, past and present, has been a constant interrogation of these aesthetics to read a wide range of Asian literatures (including postcolonial and Asian American texts) and to promote Gothic theory as a viable method of interpreting Asian narratives. As of 2008, I have accepted an invitation from the University of Stirling to be part of a network project known as “Global Gothic”. This project involves reading the Gothic within national/cultural contexts as well as transnational/intercultural ones.

In line with my research, I have recently completed editing two volumes of work which are related to the Gothic. The first is Asian Gothic: Essays in Literature, Film and Anime (NJ: McFarland, 2008) which gather fourteen essays written by new and established scholars such as Glennis Byron and Sheng-mei Ma. These essays attest to the flexibility of Gothic criticism to appreciate narratives beyond the Anglo-American Gothic. The second volume is The Poetics of Shadows: The Double in Literature and Philosophy. The eight essays here draw on both Eastern and Western philosophies to unpack the signifiers of literary double, resisting the familiar psychoanalytical readings which have more or less monopolized understanding of this motif. Contributors include Jonardon Ganeri and Daniel P. Watt.

Apart from this, I am currently undertaking research examining the way in which religion features in Anglophone Malaysian literature. Analyzing the writings of Lee Kok Liang, Lloyd Fernando, Shirley Lim, K.S. Maniam and some emerging Malay writers, I discuss the way in which these writers negotiate religion and aspects such as race, sex, nationalism and gender in their works, often relying heavily on irony to contest homogenizing agendas.

I am also involved in various smaller projects on Malaysian literature in English commissioned by Blackwell and National University of Singapore Press.


Academic Publications

Forthcoming “Temporal Inversion and Memory Refused: Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow”. Time and Memory in Narrative, vol. 1. Eds. Karl Simms and Shilpa Venkatachalam. Amsterdam/ New York: Rodopi.
2008 “Subjecting Space: Angela Carter’s Love”. Contemporary Literature 49.3 (2008).
2008 "Gothic Illuminations of the Postmodern and Postcolonial Conditionsin Salman Rushdie's Fury", in Framing the Contemporary: British Asian Fictions. Eds. Neil Murphy and Sim Wai
Chew. Amherst NY: Cambria Press.
2008 “The Vision of Hospitality in Lloyd Fernando’s Scorpion Orchid”. Journal of Postcolonial Writing.
2008 Editor. Asian Gothic: Essays in Literature, Film and Anime. NJ.: McFarland Pub.
2008 Editor. The Poetics of Shadows: The Double in Literature and Philosophy. Ibidem-Verlag: Stuttgart, Germany.
2007 Interrogating Interstices: Gothic Aesthetics in Postcolonial Asian and Asian American Literature. Peter Lang: New York/London.
2007 “Haunting Concubines”: Reading Su Tong’s ‘Raise the Red Lantern’ as Story about Ghosts Seeking Substitutes”. Ghost, Gender and History. Ed. Sladja Blazan. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007. 41-57.
2007 “Revisiting Judges 19: A Gothic Perspective”, The Journal for the Studies of the Old Testament. 32.2 (2007): 199-215.
2007 “Tarrying with the Numinous: Postmodern Japanese Gothic Stories”, New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies, 9. 2: 65–86.
2007 “The Wider Shores of Gothic”, Meanjin, 66.2: 149–56.
2007 “The Maternal Imagination in the Poetry of Shirley Lim”, Women: A Cultural Review, 18. 2:162–81.
2007 “Adorno, Foucault, and Said: Toward a Multicultural Gothic Aesthetics”, Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, 33.1 (2007): 177–98.
2006 “Malaysian Gothic: The Motif of Haunting in K.S. Maniam’s “Haunting the Tiger” and Shirley Lim’s “Haunting”’. Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, 39. 2: 75 – 88.
2005 Ng, Andrew “‘At the Threshold of Eternity’: Religious Inversion in Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor” . In Race and Religion in the Postcolonial British Detective Story. Kim J (Ed). McFarland Pub.: Jefferson.
2005 “A Tale from the Crypt: Arundathi Roy’s The God of Small Things”. Commonwealth Essays and Studies: 27.2: 45-58.
2005 “Muscular Existentialism in Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club. Stirrings Still: A Journal of Existential Literature: 2.2. 116 – 38. 
2005 “Nationalism, Feminism and the Rupturing of the Binary: Reading Salman Rushdie’s Shame as Gothic”. Exit 9: Rutgers Journal of Comparative Literature 7: 55-68.
2005 “Reading Asian American Literature as Gothic: Two Women’s Texts and the Re- signification of an American Literary Heritage”. South East Asian Review of English 46: 42-69.
2004 Dimensions of Monstrosity in Contemporary Narratives: Theory, Psychoanalysis, Postmodernism. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, New York.
2004 Review Article: “Clearly breathing once again: The State of Malaysian literature in English”. South East Asian Review of English 46: 80–90.
2004 “Footbinding and Masochism: A psychoanalytical exploration”. Women Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 33.5: 651–76.
2001 “Politics of Deformed Bodies/Space in  Adib  Khan’s The Storyteller”. South East Asian Review of English 45: 30-50
2000 “The  Paradox  of  Keda:  A  Postcolonial  (Gothic)  Reading  of  Mervyn  Peake’s  Gormenghast Trilogy”. Peake Studies 6. 4.


Non-peer-reviewed Publications (selected)

2008 “Shirley Lim’s Monsoon History”. The Literary Encyclopedia. www. litencyc.com
2007 “Can Xue” and “Su Tong”, two entries in The Compendium of Twentieth Century World Novelists and Novels. Ed. Michael Sollars, New York: Facts on File Inc.