In this article I discuss a verse narrative, Lục Vân Tiên, written by Nguyễn Đình Chiểu in the late 1850s. It is a story about the adventures of a young scholar, Lục Vân Tiên. On his way to the capital to take the mandarin exams he first saves a young . . .

In this article I describe “coupling” in Vietnamese—the juxtaposing of two items that are antithetical, or nearly antithetical, in meaning. I give examples of coupling in myths, poetry, speeches, essays, and four-syllable expressions. In Vietnam’s myt . . .

During the Second Indochina War, Nguyễn Minh Châu (1930-1989), a Communist Party member and writer for the army, wrote short stories and novels according to the dictates of socialist realism—works which glorified the exploits of revolutionary soldiers . . .

Until the late 1980s and early 1990s Vietnamese literary historians, most of them northerners, argued that the Vietnamese novel began in the north with Hoang Ngoc Phach’s To Tam (Pure Heart) and Nguyen Trong Thuat’s Qua dua do (The Red Melon). Both th . . .

Tác giả cho rằng có ít nhất bảy lý do giải thích hiện tượng Trịnh Công Sơn: sự mới mẻ trong những bản tình ca ban đầu của ông, việc ông gợi lên những đề tài Phật giáo, hoàn cảnh trình diễn đặc biệt của miền Nam Việt Nam vào những năm chiến tranh, cá t . . .

Tiểu thuyết đã xuất hiện tại miền Nam Việt Nam trước khi Hoàng Ngọc Phách xuất bản quyển Tố Tâm tại Hanoi năm 1925 (Xin xem bài “Tiểu thuyết xuất hiện tại Nam Kỳ” của John C. Schafer và Thế Uyên). Tuy nhiên tác phẩm này đã làm xôn xao dư luận. Hai tác . . .

This article attempts to explain the extraordinary popularity of Vietnamese composer and singer Trịnh Công Sơn. Although he attracted attention with love songs composed in the late 1950s, it was his antiwar songs, particularly those collected in Songs . . .

This article describes Ngô Kha, a teacher, poet, army officer, and anti-government activist from Huế who was seized by undercover policemen in February, 1973, and never seen again. It describes his teaching, writing, friendship with Trịnh Công Sơn, an . . .

In this article I investigate notions of womanhood in Vietnam by examining an autobiography by Lê Vân, a well-known actress. My approach, taken from literary studies, is intertextual: It assumes that in telling their life stories authors will inevitab . . .

The novel genre had already emerged in southern Vietnam (see John C. Schafer and The Uyen’s “The Novel Emerges in Cochinchina”) when Hoang Ngoc Phach published his novel To Tam in Hanoi in 1925. Nevertheless this work created a sensation. It affected . . .