Yiu, Angela 1962-

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Yiu, Angela 1962-

PERSONAL: Born 1962. Education: Cornell University, B.A., 1985; Yale University, M.A. (East Asian studies), 1986, M.A. (East Asian languages and literatures), 1988, M.Phil., 1989, Ph.D., 1992.

ADDRESSES: Office—Sophia University, Graduate Program in Comparative Culture, 4 Yonbancho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 102-0081, Japan; fax: 81-3-3238-4076. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, associate lecturer in Japanese language, 1989-90; Josai International University, Chiba, Japan, assistant professor, 1992-99; Sophia University, Tokyo, Japan, associate professor of Japanese literature. Visiting professor, Connecticut College, 1988-89.

WRITINGS:

Chaos and Order in the Works of Natsume Soseki, University of Hawaii Press (Honolulu, HI), 1998.

English consultant to Shogakukan-Random House Japanese-English Dictionary, 2nd edition, Shogakukan (Tokyo, Japan), 1993. Contributor to books, including Studies in Modern Japanese Literature: Essays and Translations in Honor of Edwin McClellan, University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 1997. Contributor to periodicals, including Review of Asian and Pacific Studies, Review of Japanese Culture and Society, and Monumenta Nipponica.

SIDELIGHTS: Angela Yiu is the author of Chaos and Order in the Works of Natsume Soseki. Soseki, who lived from 1867 to 1916, is considered Japan's finest twentieth-century novelist. He is best known for his novels Botchan, published in 1906, and Kokoro, published in 1914. "Born at the very moment of the Meiji Restoration," observed Times Literary Supplement contributor Anthony Twaite, Soseki "captured exactly the conflict between his 'backward' country and all the new influences that were pouring in during his youth."

In Chaos and Order in the Works of Natsume Soseki, Yiu considers Soseki's popular novels as well as his lesser-known writings, including critical essays, poetry, and lectures. In World Literature Today, Erik R. Lofgren stated that "Yiu makes no apologies for her critically conservative work that profitably examines Soseki as an author split between the two competing forces of her title." According to Thwaite, Yiu presents Soseki as a "writer who was torn between straightforward (some would say 'Western') notions of analytical placing, theory, almost antiseptic 'order,' on the one hand, and something stranger, richer, more chaotic, elusive and inscrutable on the other. He was confident, a marvellously clear thinker, but he was also full of frailty and doubt." Thwaite concluded that "Yiu's sensitive study is helpful, original, and on the whole clearly written."