Kajian Malaysia, Vol. 30, Supp.1, 2012, 23–45 © Penerbit Universiti Sains Malaysia, 2012 ARTISTS IN THE FLOATING WORLD: THE PROSE FICTION OF LEE KOK LIANG, LLOYD FERNANDO, K. S. MANIAM AND SHIRLEY GEOK-LIN LIM 1 Bernard Wilson Department of English Language, College of Arts and Sciences University of Tokyo, Komaba, Japan Email: Benard.wilson@education.ox.ac.uk This essay provides an overview of four of the major writers of anglophone Malaysian literature since Malaysian independence in order to assess the supposed "evolution" of the thematic concerns within these texts. The anglophone literature of Malaysia has moved beyond traditional colonial/postcolonial binaries and is now as much represented through a prism of diaspora and transnationalism. While such a position provides fresh opportunities for a reinterpretation of Malaysian history and society and its broader relationship to the forces of globalization in terms of the perceived dissolution of national and cultural boundaries in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, it also carries with it the associated perils of accepting transition (or impermanence) as an oxymoronic, permanent state. The essay examines the role of each of the authors, from a biographical and textual perspective, in addressing these issues and finds that while a guarded resolution may be seen to take place for those authors whose work and lives have been predominantly located in Malaysia (Lee Kok Liang, Lloyd Fernando and K. S. Maniam), the prose fiction of Shirley Geok-lin Lim indicates progress on a transnational basis but regression on a more, localised Malaysian scale. Keywords: Malaysian anglophone literature, postcolonialism, diaspora, transnationalism, globalization, marginalization. Social differences are not simply given to experience through an already authenticated cultural tradition; they are the signs of the emergence of community envisaged as a project – at once a vision and a construction – that takes you "beyond" yourself in order to return, in a spirit of revision and reconstruction, to the political conditions of the present. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture All men are made in order to tell the truth of their land, and some tell it in words, some in blood, and others with a true grandeur