From Source to Allusion

This chapter examines the synchronic renewals and the repurposing of Alexander the Great’s image in canonical English and Malay literatures. More specifically, it considers the transmission of the Alexander Romance and its common motifs into English and Malay as well as the shared strand of literary reception that link these traditions together as cousins rather than wholly separate. It also explores how both English and Malay literatures, invoking Alexander to mediate intercultural encounters, use him to fashion a vocabulary for a cultural politics of hybridity. More importantly, English and Malay literary traditions meet in connected themes mediated by Alexander and intersect in their shared deployment of him to figure intercultural relations arising from trade.