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"Teaching in California as the war in Vietnam raged, he quietly agonizes over the question of where the Filipino writer should locate himself in the world: An imagination, a sensibility, that emerges out of a Third World environment, must fend for itself, for it is easy prey to the rabid charity of other worlds. This haunting, this hauntedness is a problem of the soul, and it is not [N.V.M.] Gonzalez’s alone. To be visited by a spirit, touched by the spectral presence of absence; to catch the miasmic whiff of the unburied dead, the traces of what has been silenced and forgotten — haunting is a metaphor for what drives the vocation of writers and the practice of writing. It is also an eloquent sign of our social malaise as Filipinos, symptom of the profound affliction of a nation not quite conscious of itself." This essay by Resil Mojares was originally delivered as a keynote lecture, and remains a classic reflection on the writer as Filipino.

As the poet Trinidad Tarosa Subido wrote in the late 1930s, "They took away the language of my blood, giving me one 'more widely understood.'" Like Subido's poem 'Muted Cry,' this landmark book traces the doubly colonized evolution of Philippine prose and poetry through the intersection of gender (women) and medium (the English language) over the twentieth century.

A history of the short story form in the Philippines, tracing its tradition from the Hispanic period into the contemporary moment, that ends with the question of its limited audience and potential evolution.

European in provenance, written predominately by middle-class writers, but is the genre most made to depict the experience of society in the round, albeit most often through the lens of individual experience, Caroline S. Hau breaks down the paradoxes of the Filipino novel in English and the social, linguistic, and ideological contexts in which it is shaped.

Resil Mojares's pioneering study of the Filipino novel argues for fiction's deep native roots, drawing from local traditions of oral epics, ballads, and tales, in addition to latter colonial and global influences. This book examines novels in Spanish, English, Tagalog, Cebuano, as well as some works in Iloko and Hiligaynon.