Product Description

The Sarawak United People's Party (SUPP) is Sarawak's oldest political party. This book explains how the SUPP has been able to change from a left-wing, anti-Malaysia political entity into an establishment Barisan Nacional (BN) component party without losing the support of the Sarawak Chinese community. This is in contrast with other Chinese-based BN political parties such as the Malyasian Chinese Association (MCA) and Gerakan which have increasingly seen a deterioration of their Chinese electoral support.

Product Details

• Published on: 1997-12-11
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 350 pages

About the Author
Matthew Leigh is Fellow and Tutor in Classical Languages and Literature at St Anne's College, Oxford.

Customer Reviews

Significant contribution
Leigh's take on comedy is historical and discursive rather than formalist or analytical: he reads the comic texts in juxtaposition to the historical context that defined them, not in order to mine Comedy for historical information or in order to use History to extract nuances and meanings for the comic texts, but in a manner that keeps these two methodologies in constant dialogue. Leigh maps out intersections between history and comedy not necessarily in the form of direct allusions or overt political commentary on the part of the plays, but in the sense of discursive categories recurring in the frameworks of the plays: the ethical construction of military trickery; the Roman prisoner of war; the conflict between agrarian and mercantile economies; the exercise of imperium and the habit of command (p.22).
Leigh is quite sensitive in the power dynamics between the imperial Roman and the subjected Greek culture that shape the historical discourse of the period. The opic, however, certainly warranted much more attention and analysis. Leigh's observation that the dialectical pattern city/country found in Greek New Comedy is Romanised by being translated into an opposition betwee Greek=urban abd Roman=agrarian is incisive and original. His nsistence, however, that the Greek context from which these ideologicla binaries derive was apolitical is out of contact with recent developments in scholarship.
All in all, this is a successful books that adds to the recent flury of publication on Greek and Roman New Comedy, a field of study that has been revolutionised in the last 25 years.