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Most literary analysis of the canon of Indonesian literature overlooks its religious aspect. This book is the first to discuss the construction of gender and Islamic identities in literary writing by four prominent Indonesian Muslim women writers: Titis Basino P I, Ratna Indraswari Ibrahim, Abidah El Kalieqy and Helvy Tiana Rosa. The narratives of the four writers are rich sources for revealing the construction of Indonesian Muslim women's identities. Within their feminist reading the writers understand that gender roles are negotiable rather than inherent. In representing women in a variety of discourses they draw multi-faceted women struggling against repression and domination, and resisting their status as powerless. Dit is het eerste boek waarin de verhouding tussen geslacht en islamitische identiteit in de Indonesische literatuur wordt onderzocht. Diah Ariani Arimbi doet dit aan de hand van vier schrijfsters: Titis Basino P I, Ratna Indraswari Ibrahim, Abidah El Kalieqy en Helvy Tiana Rosa. Het verhaal van deze vier vrouwen onthult de ware identiteit van Indonesische moslima's. Vanuit hun feministisch standpunt laten deze schrijfsters zien dat verhoudingen tussen man en vrouw niet statisch zijn, maar veranderlijk en onderhandelbaar. Arimbi schetst een innemend beeld van deze veelzijdige vrouwen en hun strijd tegen onderdrukking en discriminatie. Zij blijken allesbehalve weerloze zielen te zijn.

This paper focuses on the ways in which watershed events in Indonesian national history are illuminated in a work of fiction, and how a Javanese worldview gives rise to particular, localized understandings of the events. The work of fiction is Sitok Srengenge's first novel, Menggarami burung terbang (Seasoning the flying bird), the action of which is bracketed by the years 1948 and 1965. The protagonists of the novel are unassuming village folk who are bewildered at the political events and mass brutality that overtake them, and whose understanding of the world is filtered through natural omens. Such a worldview is described by Quinn (1992:124) as a 'teleological' view of phenomena, in other words a belief that everything that exists and happens - including natural omens - does so for a final purpose, that there is a reason for everything.

The recent re-publication of a number of previously ignored and dismissed works of Indonesian fiction describe the political imagination and aspirations of literate Indonesians of the late colonial period. Two novels, 'Pacar Merah Indonesia' and 'Drama di Boven Digu' point to the possibility of imagining an Indonesia and a sense of Indonesianness outside the narrow orthodoxies and mythologies that were characteristic of this period.