Robert Yeo

The adventures of Holden Heng

The Singapore Trilogy

Patriotism: do you have it? How does one express it? Is it worth it? The Singapore Trilogy—consisting of Are You There, Singapore?, One Year Back Home and Changi—has raised questions since the seventies about nationhood that we are still asking today. Influential in steering early English-language theatre in Singapore away from its colonial roots, Robert Yeo conceived of characters that are believably local in speech, thought and behaviour, and provided a dramatic platform for the dialogue of politically sensitive issues. Yeo’s trilogy continues to link to an exciting time of sociopolitical flux in Singapore’s history, and engages by provoking us to explore the meaning of being Singaporean. This edition of these three landmark playscripts is accompanied by a new introduction from the playwright, as well as a reappraisal by Nah Dominic and Adeeb Fazah, who restaged the entire trilogy in one single condensed adaptation in March 2021.

Richard Yeo

The eighteenth-century English dictionaries of arts and sciences claimed to contain all knowledge that a person of education should possess. These early encyclopaedias responded to the explosion of information by reducing knowledge to essentials, stressing the need for a coherent account of the sciences, and for some time excluding biography and history. Richard Yeo places these scientific dictionaries in a rich cultural framework of debate that includes the arrangement of knowledge, the Republic of Letters, the Enlightenment public sphere, copyright issues and the specialisation of science. He discusses dilemmas involved in the quest for knowledge to be both organised and readily available, examining assumptions about the organisation, communication and control of knowledge in these works. Elegantly illustrated and accessibly written, Encyclopaedic Visions provides a major contribution to Enlightenment studies and the history of ideas in general.

Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture

Encyclopaedic Visions

Looking back, every person should have a memory of loss although he may not necessarily appreciate truly what he would find. Robert Yeo relives the memory of one such loss in poems alive with youthful longing. Included in this collection are also poems about the facts of experience, observed by an eye as canny as the voice is commanding. At 80, the storehouse of skill and confidence is in ample display. Colette is a celebration of the vitality of life, as lived through poetry.

A Colette Sequence & Other Poems

Enter the world of Holden Heng, the not-so-lucky-in-love protagonist of this comic realist novel that documents social currents transforming the Lion City. Described as the most Singaporean of Singapore writers, Robert Yeo presents an immensely entertaining story of a typical Singaporean man’s escapades with three very different women. Will he ever find true love?

Robert Yeo

Books

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