Edinburgh Studies in Modern Arabic Literature

Examines the work and reception of the Arab émigré writer Gibran Khalil Gibran

• Analyses Gibran’s Arabophone and Anglophone writings together and in context, rethinking in the process the relationship between poetics and politics
• Offers situated close readings that demythologise Gibran and demonstrate his creative embeddedness in global modernity and the Arab nahda
• Draws on posthumously published texts that shed new light on Gibran’s oeuvre and its historical and contemporary relevance
• Discusses the problematic of Gibran’s bilingualism with an up-to-date critical and conceptual apparatus
• Studies and questions the reception of the Anglophone Gibran in the American and Arab contexts, providing a rounded picture of Gibran as an incarnation of Arab world literature

The monograph studies the Arab mahjari (émigré) writer Gibran Khalil Gibran (Kahlil Gibran) by examining his oeuvre as bilingual Arabic literature beyond biographical and culturalist approaches. It situates Gibran within his worldly contexts to unveil and analyse how the particular and the universal dialectically intersect in his multifarious work, including poetry, short stories, essays, plays and letters. What emerges is a post-religious poet who is both modern and critical of modernity, a creative but anxious bilingual writer, and a critical-nationalist intellectual embedded in the nahda or Arab renaissance. In its situated close readings of Gibran’s work in both languages and across genres and contexts, the book reveals what is both absent and absented in its Anglo-American reception, demonstrating that there is much more to Gibran than his famous book The Prophet. It also probes this reception alongside its Arabic counterpart, highlighting and interrogating the multiple conditions of reading that have produced different functions of Gibran.

Interrogates the relationship between revolutionary movements and experimental life writing forms by contemporary Arab women

• Uniquely interrogates the interplay of power, gender, and resistance in life narratives by politically committed Arab women and explores the strategic function of non-fiction in articulating the role and position of women during crucial historial moments
• Offers a new understanding of Arab life writing as part of a cultural corpus of resistance literature which must be contextualised and understood within specific fields of power
• Brings together critically acclaimed and less familiar texts by Arab women to examine a range of experimental autobiographical modes, including online forms of self-expression
• Covers recent history and ongoing socio-political upheavals with a focus on regional imperatives

In the context of twenty-first century Arab uprisings, women invoke the complexity of their experiences as citizens, revolutionaries, women and writers through a range of narrative strategies. Autobiographical discourses that emerge as part of national revolutionary struggles make audible Arab women’s voices and experiences, foregrounding women as active social and political agents and redefining conventions of self-representation and narration.

Drawing on autobiographical and postcolonial theories, Contemporary Arab Women’s Life Writing and the Politics of Resistance examines contemporary Arab women’s life writing as sites for the articulation of resistance to interlocking power structures and sociocultural and representational norms. Looking comparatively at subgenres of memoir, auto-portrait, testimony, diary and digital life writing across different linguistic and national contexts, this book explores why resistance is important when writing about the self for Arab women and how it is articulated through experimental formal and thematic approaches to the autobiographical genre.

Examines the circulation of literature, routes of comparison and the legacies of transcontinental ties

• Traces cultural exchange between Latin America and the Arab world in the 20th and 21st centuries
• Examines the relationship between Latin American and Arabic literatures and the circulation of literature across continents with historical, cultural and literary ties
• Analyses works by Gabriel García Márquez, Héctor Abad Faciolince, Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Alberto Ruy Sánchez, Naguib Mahfouz, Elias Khoury, Sonallah Ibrahim, Mohamed Makhzangi, Jabbar Yussin Hussin and Hassan Blasim

Since the 19th century, Arab migration from the Ottoman Empire to Latin America and Latin American travel to the Arab world has created transcontinental routes – and in the late 20th century, the translation of Latin American classics into Arabic flourished in the Arab world. Drawing on Latin American and Arabic novels, travelogues, memoirs, short stories and chronicles from Cuba, Colombia, Mexico, Guatemala, Egypt, Lebanon and Iraq, Tahia Abdel Nasser shows how cultural exchange between Latin America and the Arab world cemented historical and diplomatic ties. She also explores how a new cadre of men of letters – poets, writers and intellectuals – shaped Arab Latin American encounters in the late 20th century.

Explores how nahda translations of the Bible transformed Arabic language and literature

• Intervenes in theoretical debates on translation and world literature by historicising the role of the Bible as the inaugurating object for thinking translation, since Eugene Nida’s foundational impact on the field
• Revises historical narratives of language development that have proliferated since the nineteenth century, and that have credited the nahda Bible with modernising Arabic
• Narrates a previously untold story of the modern translations of the Arabic Bible within the larger, dynamic contexts of the nahda and its entanglements with globalisation
• Connects the most popular works of al-Bustānī and al-Shidyāq, two foundational figures of the nahda, with their early careers as Bible translators
• Explores competing narratives about Arabic’s linguistic origins and literary aspirations and how the translations of the Bible intervened in their formation

This innovative study compares nineteenth-century Arabic translations of the Bible to determine how it emerged as a foundational text of Arab modernity. Bible translation gained global traction through the work of Anglophone Christian missionaries, who made an attempt at synchronising translated Bibles in world languages by laying down strict guidelines and supervising the processes of translation and dissemination. By engaging with the intellectual beginnings of two local translators, Butrus al-Bustani (1819 – 1883) and Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq (1804 –1887), as well as their subsequent contributions to Arabic language and literature, this book questions to what extent they complied with the missionaries’ strategy in practice. Based on documents from the archives of Bible societies that tell the story of two key nahda versions of the text, we come to understand how colonial pressure was secondary to the process of incorporating the Bible into the nahda project of rethinking Arabic.

Since the 1990s, Arabic exile literature in Europe has increasingly become a literature written from the perspective of refugees, asylum seekers, undocumented migrants and others who are situated outside normatively defined citizenship. In this book, Johanna Sellman analyses the changing aesthetic and political dimensions of Arabic exile literature and demonstrates how frameworks such as east–west cultural encounters, political commitment and modernist understandings of exile – which were dominant in 20th-century Arabic exile literature – have been giving way to writing that explores the dynamics of forced migration and the liminal spaces of borders and borderlands.

Provides a new and original analysis on how Lebanese francophone women authors wrote about the Lebanese civil war

• The first book to study the intersection between narrative studies or narratology, trauma and gender in the context of non-western literature
• Examines Lebanese francophone novels by first- and second-generation women writers from the 1970s to today
• Explores novels that have never been studied before or received very little attention
• Offers in-depth analysis of theories and literary analysis
• Advances new theories on the body, narratology, and trauma

Writers in contemporary Lebanon stand at the crossroads of challenging and often violent dynamics in a multi-ethnic postcolonial society where competing cultural and political forces present specific and pressing problems for women. This book examines French-language narratives published between the 1970s and the present day by Lebanese women writers focusing on the civil war of 1975-1991. Drawing on a corpus of writings by Vénus Khoury-Ghata, Etel Adnan, Evelyne Accad, Andrée Chedid, Hyam Yared, and Georgia Makhlouf, some of which has previously received little or no scholarly attention, the book examines in innovative ways the use of distinctive narrative forms to address inter-linked questions of violence, war trauma, and gender relations.

Examines one of the most controversial poetic forms in Arabic: the Arabic prose poem

• Examines the ‘new genre’ of the prose poem as a poetic practice and as a critical lens
• Adopts a case-study approach to a number of poets, including: Adonis, Muhammad al-Maghut, Salim Barakat, Mahmoud Darwish and Wadi‘ Saʿadeh
• Adopts a comparative approach across time periods, genres, identity and cultural traditions

The Arabic prose poem gave rise to a profound, contentious and continuing debate about Arabic poetry: its definition, its limits and its relation to its readers. Huda J. Fakhreddine examines the history of the prose poem, its claims of autonomy and distance from its socio-political context, and the anxiety and scandal it generated.

When the modernist movement in Arabic poetry was launched in the 1940s, it threatened to blur the distinctions between poetry and everything else. The Arabic prose poem is probably the most subversive and extreme manifestation of this blurring. It is often described as an oxymoron, a non-genre, an anti-genre, a miracle and even a conspiracy.

Traces the portrayals of the 1919 Egyptian Revolution in literary and cinematic narratives

• Re-examines the 1919 Egyptian Revolution in light of the momentous events of 2011
• Draws on theoretical approaches in memory studies to investigate the construction of 1919 as a moment of ecstatic nationalist unity
• Analyses and contextualises representations of the 1919 revolution as narrated in a wide range of novels, films, plays, memoirs and television dramas.
• Provides a new analysis of canonical novels by Naguib Mahfouz and Tawfiq al-Hakim

The 1919 anti-colonial revolution is a key moment in modern Egyptian history and a historical reference point in Egyptian culture through the century. Dina Heshmat argues that literature and film have played a central role in the making of its memory. She highlights the processes of remembering and forgetting that have contributed to shaping a dominant imaginary about 1919 in Egypt, coined by successive political and cultural elites. As she seeks to understand how and why so many voices have been relegated to the margins, she reinserts elements of the different representations into the dominant narrative. This opens up a new perspective on the legacy of 1919 in Egypt, inviting readers to meet the marginalised voices of the revolution and to reconnect with its layered emotional fabric.

Traces the developments in Libyan novel writing from the 1970s to 2011 through encounters between human, animal and land

• Locates the study of internationally renowned authors Ibrahim al-Kuni (b. 1948) and Hisham Matar (b. 1970) within the context of their Libyan compatriots
• Analyses works by al-Sadiq al-Nayhum and Ahmad Ibrahim al-Faqih, previously neglected in English-language scholarship
• Adds nuance to the understanding of animals as straightforward political allegory, and brings a non-western, Islamic perspective to the study of the ‘creaturely’
• Tackles postcolonial themes from the little-studied case of Italy and Libya
• Suggests new approaches to postmodernism within a politically and economically isolated country

Analysing prominent novelists such as Ibrahim al-Kuni and Hisham Matar, alongside lesser-known and emerging voices, this book introduces the themes and genres of the Libyan novel during the al-Qadhafi era. Exploring latent political protest and environmental lament in the writing of novelists in exile and in the Jamahiriyya, Charis Olszok focuses on the prominence of encounters between humans, animals and the land, the poetics of vulnerability that emerge from them, and the vision of humans as creatures (makhlūqāt) in which they are framed.

As Libya transforms into a dictatorial, rentier state, animals represent multi-layered allegories for human suffering, while also becoming focal points for empathy and ethics in their own right. Within reflections on Italian colonisation and ensuing forms of political and social oppression, concomitant with oil, urbanisation, exile and war, staged in remote deserts, isolated coastlines and neglected city parks, The Libyan Novel examines how physical, emotional and intellectual hardship prompts empathetic gazes across species lines. Through engagement with the folkloric and Sufi traditions that define the country’s past and shape its modern fiction, it further traces the spiritually, environmentally and politically holistic imaginings that contest a precarious reality.

Explores discourses on gender and representations of women in modern Iraqi fiction

• Includes marginalised voices in Arabic literary scholarship, such as religious writings by Iraqi Shia women
• Challenges canonical views of modern Arabic literature by studying propaganda texts such as the novels of Saddam Hussein
• Argues for an interdisciplinary interpretation of literary texts as cultural products that must be contextualised in the ‘market’ in which they emerge and are received
• Uses the concept of ‘paratexts’ in order to better understand how political works circulate and are marketed to reach a wider audience
• Relates to broader regional issues such as national identity and the status of women in Arabic societies
• Find out more: watch Hawraa Al-Hassan in conversation with Narguess Farzad, talking about Women, Writing and the Iraqi Ba‘thist State

In an effort to expand its readership and increase support for its pan-Arab project, the Iraqi Ba‘th almost completely eradicated illiteracy among women. As Iraq was metaphorically transformed into a ‘female’, through its nationalist trope, women writers simultaneously found opportunities and faced obstacles from the state, as the ‘woman question’ became a site of contention between those who would advocate the progressiveness of the Ba‘th and those who would stress its repressiveness and immorality. By exploring discourses on gender in both propaganda and high art fictional writings by Iraqis, this book offers an alternative narrative of the literary and cultural history of Iraq.

Considers the changing role of literary translation in Egypt from the 1910s to the 1940s

In this novel and pioneering study Maya I. Kesrouany explores the move from Qur’anic to secular approaches to literature in early 20th-century Egyptian literary translations, asking what we can learn from that period and the promise that translation held for the Egyptian writers of fiction at that time. Through their early adaptations, these writers crafted a prophetic, secular vocation for the narrator that gave access to a world of linguistic creation and interpretation unavailable to the common reader or the religious cleric. This book looks at the writers’ claim to secular prophecy as it manifests itself in the adapted narrative voice of their translations to suggest an original sense of literary resistance to colonial oppression and occupation in the early Arabic novel.

Key Features

• Case studies of Arabic adaptations of European literature (including works from Chateaubriand, Carlyle, Dickens and Voltaire) contribute to an understanding of the development of the modern Arabic novel today
• Explores the exchange between the Arabic and the European novel in an original and radically comparative framework
• Shows how different translation trends signal the emergence of literature as a historical and aesthetic field
• Draws on translation, literary and post/colonial theory to rethink nahda literature’s contribution to the post 1950s Arabic novel

A critical analysis of the intersection between nationalism, literature and space in modern Egyptian fiction

• Includes close readings of literary texts by 11 Egyptian writers from the 1960s generation: Sonallah Ibrahim, Gamal al-Ghitani, Ibrahim Aslan, Radwa Ashour, Edwar al-Kharrat, Ibrahim Abdel Meguid, Abd al-Hakim Qasim, Yusuf al-Qaid, Yahya Taher Abdullah, Bahaa Taher and Muhammad al-Bisati
• Theorizes the connection between rural, urban and exilic space in Egyptian literary production
• Provides a broad understanding of the social, political and economic changes that took place in Egypt and their influence upon the work of these writers
• Expands beyond the boundaries of a single decade to show how this literary generation transformed the cultural landscape and remains relevant today

In 1960s Egypt a group of writers exploded onto the literary scene, transforming the aesthetic landscape. Space in Modern Egyptian Fiction explores how this literary generation presents a marked shift in the representation of rural, urban and exilic space, reflecting a disappointment with the project of the postcolonial nation-state in Egypt.

Combining a sociological approach to literature with detailed close readings, Yasmine Ramadan explores the spatial representations that embodied this shift within the Egyptian literary scene and the disappearance of an idealized nation in the Egyptian novel. This study provides a robust examination of the emergence and establishment of some of the most significant writers in modern Egyptian literature, and their influence across six decades, while also tracing the social, economic, political and aesthetic changes that marked this period in Egypt’s contemporary history.

Explores blogs as a new form of literature emerging in Egypt during the rise of political protests

Six years before the Egyptian revolution of January 2011, many young Egyptians had resorted to blogging as a means of self-expression and literary creativity. This resulted in the emergence of a new literary genre: the autofictional blog. Such blogs are explored here as forms of digital literature, combining literary analysis and interviews with the authors.

The blogs analysed give readers a glimpse into the daily lives, feelings and aspirations of the Egyptian youth who have pushed the country towards a cultural and political revolution. The narratives are also indicative of significant aesthetic and political developments taking place in Arabic literature and culture.

Key Features

• A pioneering study of Arabic digital literature
• Investigates blogs as the latest form of autobiographical writing in Arabic literature
• Sets out an innovative methodology for studying literary texts distributed on social media, opening new avenues for research
• Based on the study of forty blogs written from Egypt, six of which are analysed as detailed case studies

Charts the struggle between religious and secular discourse in the Egyptian novel

• Analyses religious themes in 18 Egyptian novels, drawing on a range of critical theories
• First close study of the Coptic theme in the Arabic novel
• Includes close readings of key works such as the Mahfouz’s trilogy, as well as important but overlooked works such Mahfouz’s Hikayat Haratna and ‘Asda al-Sirat al-Dhatiyya, and ‘Abd al-Hakim Qasim’s Al-Mahdi and Turaf Akhbar al-Akhira

This in-depth, original survey of religion in the modern Arabic novel traces the relationship from the genesis of the form in the early 20th century to the present. Phillips provides a thematic exploration of the push and pull between religion and secularism as it played out on the pages of the Egyptian novel. Through close readings of representative texts, the book reveals the manifold ways in which Islam, Christianity, Sufism, myth, ritual and intertext have engaged in modern Arabic literature and culture more broadly.

Explores the encounters between East and West in Maghrebi literature in the pre-1945 period

• Focuses on the work of early Algerian intelligentsia known as the Young Algerians and their insistent letters to the Occident
• Depicts the Maghrebi encounter with the Occident as a plea to extend Western civilisation to all factions of the colonised society
• Engages with the work of early French feminists and its impact on the birth of Algerian feminism
• Includes readings of key texts by Chukri Khodja, Saad ben Ali, Djamila Débêche, Fadhma Amrouche, Mouloud Feraoun, Mohamed Dib, Ferhat Abbas and Albert Memmi, amongst many others

Maghrebi literature published in the first half of the twentieth century is a subject that seldom receives focused scholarly treatment. This is partly due to limited availability of the books, some of which were printed in as few as fifty copies. Zahia Smail Salhi tracked down these rare works and put them in the spotlight for the first time here. Through close textual analysis and in-depth engagement with religious and socio-political contexts, Smail Salhi determines whether these texts belong to a collective formation we may call ‘Occidentalism’. In so doing, this book reintegrates the pre-1945 Maghrebi novels into the history and study of modern Arabic literature.

Examines the diverse uses of conspiracy theory in Egyptian fiction over the last century

• Provides the first critical study of conspiracy theory in Arabic literature
• Examines work by authors who have received little critical attention in English (Youssef Rakha, Mohammad Rabie, Ahmed Naji)
• Examines the recent “authoritarian turn” of some Egyptian authors
• Contains an Arabic edition and partial translation of Naguib Surur’s infamous underground quatrains

Conspiracy theory in the Arab World has come to be associated with the rhetoric of Islamist extremists and authoritarian regimes. Yet its principle tropes – omnipotent secret societies, impending apocalypse, heroes who crack codes – have recurred in Arabic literature as well. A number of Egyptian authors, including Ali Ahmad Bakathir, Naguib Surur, Sonallah Ibrahim, Gamal al-Ghitani, and Youssef Rakha have crafted potent narratives of conspiracy that have remained unexamined until now.

In a series of case studies, this book examines the diverse uses of conspiracy theory in Egyptian fiction since the early twentieth century. Read against the historical and intertextual backgrounds of individual authors and their works, conspiracy theory emerges not as a single, rigid ideology, but as a style of writing that is equal parts literary and political.

Identifies an emerging genre within the contemporary Egyptian novel that reflects a new consciousness

• Includes case studies of the novels of 8 authors: Idris ᶜAli, Bahaᵓ Ṭahir, ᶜAlaᵓ al-Aswani, Yusuf Zaydan, Muᶜtazz Futayha, Ashraf al-Khumaysi and Miral al-Tahawi
• Shows how these novels have taken on a mediatory role in formalising and articulating their historical moment
• Critically examines the recent developments within the Egyptian literary and socio-cultural arenas

During colonial times the Egyptian novel invoked a sovereign nation-state and basked in its perceived unity. After independence the novel began to profess disenchantment with state practices and unequal class and gender relations, but did not disrupt the nation’s imagined homogeneity. The twenty-first-century Egyptian novel, by contrast, shatters this singular view, with the rise of a new consciousness that presents Egypt as fundamentally diverse. This new consciousness responds to discourses of difference and practices of differentiation within the contexts of race, religion, class, gender, sexuality and language. It also heralds the cacophony of voices that collectively cried for social justice from Tahrir Square. Through a robust analysis of several ‘new-consciousness’ novels by award winning authors the book highlights their unconventional, yet coherent undertakings to foreground the marginal experiences of the Nubian, Amazigh, Bedouin, Coptic, Jewish, women and sexual minority populations in Egypt.

Examines the effects of colonialism and independence on modern Arab autobiography written in Arabic, English and French

In memoirs, Arab writers have invoked solitude in moments of deep public involvement. Focusing on Taha Hussein, Sonallah Ibrahim, Assia Djebar, Latifa al-Zayyat, Mahmoud Darwish, Mourid Barghouti, Edward Said, Haifa Zangana, and Radwa Ashour, this book reads a range of autobiographical forms, sources, and affinities with other literatures.

Taking a comparative approach, Nasser shows the local sources of contemporary Arab autobiography, adaptations of a global genre, and cultural exchange. She also examines different aspects of the contemporary autobiography as it has evolved in the Arab world during the past half-century, focusing on the particularity of the genre written in different languages but pertaining to one overarching Arab culture. Drawing on memoirs, testimonies, autobiographical novels, poetic autobiography, journals, and diaries, she examines solitude and national struggles in contemporary Arab autobiography.

Key Features

• Traces the effects of anticolonial and anti-imperialist movements on Arab autobiographical production in Arabic, English, and French in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries
• Provides a new assessment of autobiographical works in Arab literature and a contribution to discussions of postcolonialism and world literature
• Considers the genre’s affinities with other literatures in the global South
• Examines the effects of national movements on contemporary reworkings of the genre in which Arab writers re-envision subjectivity in national cultures and transnational networks

Examines the depiction of intellectuals in contemporary Arabic literature

Zeina G. Halabi examines the unmaking of the intellectual as prophetic figure, national icon, and exile in Arabic literature and film from the 1990s onwards. She comparatively explores how contemporary writers and film directors such as Rabee Jaber, Rawi Hage, Rashid al-Daif, Seba al-Herz and Elia Suleiman have displaced the archetype of the intellectual as it appears in writings by Elias Khoury, Edward Said, Jurji Zaidan and Mahmoud Darwish. In so doing, Halabi identifies and theorises alternative articulations of political commitment, displacement, and loss in the wake of unfulfilled prophecies of emancipation and national liberation. The Unmaking of the Arab Intellectual offers critical tools to understand the evolving relations between aesthetics and politics in the alleged post-political era of Arabic literature and culture.

Key Features

• Examines the depiction of Arab intellectuals in post-1990s literature
• Offers a new understanding of the political in the contemporary era
• Re-reads the legacy of canonical modern Arab writers
• Offers critical tools to understand the contemporary era

Read a review by Michael Allan (University of Oregon)

Listen to Zeina Halabi discuss the book on the Forum for Transregional Studien in Berlin blog

Maydan interviews Zeina Halabi - read the full article

Read a review in Arabic Literature

Examines representations of Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egyptian novels, short stories, autobiographies and films

The late President of Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918-1970), has been represented in many major works of Egyptian literature and film, and continues to have a presence in everyday life and discourse in the country. Omar Khalifah’s analysis of these representations focuses on how the historical character of Nasser has emerged in the Egyptian imaginary. He explores the recurrent images of Nasser in literature and film and shows how Nasser constitutes a perfect site for plural interpretations. He argues that Nasser has become a rhetorical device, a figure of speech, a trope that connotes specific images constantly invoked whenever he is mentioned. His study makes a case for literature and art to be seen as alternative archives that question, erase, distort and add to the official history of Nasser.

Key Features

• Contributes to the ongoing debate on Nasser and his relevance to modern Egyptians
• Traces, contextualizes, and analyses the making of Nasser’s image(s) in creative productions including novels, short stories, autobiographies and film
• Shows how Nasser functions for many Egyptians as a site of memory at times disconnected from the real historical figure he once was

An introduction to the novels of the contemporary Egyptian author Sonallah Ibrahim

Sonallah Ibrahim is one of the most important Arabic novelists of the modern era, with an unrivalled reputation for independence and integrity among contemporary Egyptian writers. Here, each of the author’s novels is discussed individually, beginning with the seminal Tilka al-ra’iha [That Smell] (1966) and ending with al-Jalid [Ice] (2011), with each work discussed in its literary, social, historical and political context.

The volume traces the evolution of Sonallah Ibrahim’s work both thematically and in terms of his literary technique, and concludes with an attempt at an overall evaluation of the author’s contribution to the contemporary Egyptian novel. Paul Starkey’s account shows how innovative and stylistically rich the Arabic novel has become over a period of some fifty years, beyond the better-known work of writers such as Naguib Mahfouz and Yusuf Idris. As such, the volume will serve as an introduction not only to the individual author but also to the development of Egyptian (and, more generally, Arabic) literature over the last half century.

Examines tangible experiences of war and occupation in recent Iraqi fiction

The last three decades in Iraqi history can be summarized in these words: dictatorship, war and occupation. After the fall of Saddam’s regime Iraqi novelists are not only writing about the occupation and the current disintegration of Iraq but are also revisiting previous wars that devastated their lives. This book examines how recent Iraqi fiction about war depicts the Iraqi subject in its relation to war, coercion, subjugation and occupation. The theoretical medieval concept of the homo sacer, the killable, as defined by Giorgio Agamben is used to explore the lives and the experiences of different war actors such as the soldier, the war deserter, the camp detainee and the suicide bomber depicted in their “bare life” as men doomed to death in the necropolitical context.

War and Occupation in Iraqi Fiction is an exploration of fictional works by a new generation of leading Iraqi authors such as Ali Badr, Shakir Nuri, Najm Wali, Hdiya Hussein and others. It brings to light the overarching continuum in the production of homines sacri in Iraq. Instances of homo sacer under the dictatorship are complemented by new instances found in the camp and under the state of exception of the occupation and the war on terror.

Key Features

• Explores fictional works by a new generation of leading Iraqi authors such as Ali Badr, Shakir Nuri, Najm Wali and Hdiya Hussein
• Provides a historical contextualization of the Iraqi novel before and after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime
• Presents an analytical and critical study of a selected corpus of novels about war and occupation in Iraq
• Explores tangible experiences of war and occupation – such as desertion, camp detention and suicide bombing – in the Iraqi novel

Takes a geographical/spatial approach to Beirut seeking to understand how the city is imagined in fiction

Exploring the ways in which writers utilize the spaces of the city – joining the factual with the imaginary – this book shows how idiosyncratic perceptions of Beirut are produced, generating an infinite number of Beiruts. The city emerges as interactive, dynamic and historical, a place that is created from the streets, buildings, and monuments as well as through performance and social interaction. By referring to factual places in Beirut, the novels produce a strong reality effect through a mimetic mode of expression. Simultaneously, these texts reveal that Beirut is an unstable locale that resists fixity and transparency, shifting between the real and imagined, and the quotidian and discursive.

Writing Beirutexplores the city in 16 Arabic novels focusing on the urban/rural divide, the imagined and idealized city, the city through panoramic views and pedestrian acts, the city as sexualized and gendered, and the city as a palimpsest. While the book focuses on Beirut in Arabic novels, the introduction provides a thorough overview of Beirut in the modern Arabic novel.

Key Features

• Takes an innovative approach to Beirut focusing on the spatial and geographical in a close literary analysis of 16 modern Arabic novels from various parts of the Arab world
• Shows how Beirut is imagined in fiction and how writers use the spaces of the city
• Draws on sources from the field of geography and space including Foucault, Lefebvre, de Certeau, Sja and Rose

Explores developments in Arab autobiography over the last 40 years

This original exploration of Arab autobiographical discourse investigates various modes of cultural identity which have emerged in Arab societies in the last 40 years. During this period, autobiographical texts moved away from exemplary life narratives and toward more unorthodox techniques such as erotic memoir writing, postmodernist self-fragmentation, cinematographic self-projection and blogging. Valerie Anishchenkova argues that the Arabic autobiographical genre has evolved into a mobile, unrestricted category arming authors with narrative tools to articulate their selfhood.

Reading works from Arab nations such as Egypt, Iraq, Morocco, Syria and Lebanon, Anishchenkova connects the century’s rapid political and ideological developments to increasing autobiographical experimentation in Arabic works. The immense scope of her study also forces consideration of film and online forms of self-representation and builds a new theoretical framework for these modes of autobiographical cultural production.

Key Features

• Investigates how diverse autobiographical subjectivities have evolved from the previous notions of uniform subjectivity
• Introduces novel autobiographical sub-genres such as autobiographical film and blogging
• Theorises the fluid and ever-expanding Arab autobiographical discourse

Studies a neglected area of postcolonial fiction, fostering a better understanding of Iraqi culture and society

This exploration of the work of Iraqi novelists begins with the early pioneering works and then moves towards an outline of the vibrant Baghdad cultural scene during the 1940s and 1950s. Particular attention is paid to detailed textual analysis and the evaluation and comparison of the aesthetic and poetic qualities of the key works of the four writers who form the central subject of the book – Abd al-Malik Nuri (1921–98), Gha’ib Tu‘ma Farman (1927–90), Mahdi Isa al-Saqr (1927–2006) and Fu’ad al-Takarli (1927–2008) – all of whom began to write in or around the pivotal decade of the 1950s.

It is in these writers’ works that Iraqi fiction came of age and reached artistic maturity. The best of them are among the most complex portrayals of the particularities of life in Iraq and the human condition in general to come out of the Arab world

Key Features

• Includes an original study of works by Abd al-Malik Nuri and of the Baghdad cultural scene in the 1940s and 50s
• Pays particular attention to detailed textual analysis and the evaluation and comparison of the aesthetic and poetic qualities of the works considered
• Analyses Iraqi writings from a postcolonial and comparative perspective
• Studies the early pioneering works of Iraqi fiction

Explores the influences that triggered the Arabic awakening, the 'nahdah', from the 1700s onwards

To understand today's Arab thinking, you need to go back to the beginnings of modernity: the nahdah or Arab renaissance of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Abdulrazzak Patel enhances our understanding of the nahdah and its intellectuals, taking into account important internal factors alongside external forces.

Patel explores the key factors that contributed to the rise and development of the nahdah. He introduces the humanist movement of the period that was the driving force behind much of the linguistic, literary and educational activity. Drawing on intellectual history, literary history and postcolonial studies, he argues that the nahdah was the product of native development and foreign assistance and that nahdah reformist thought was hybrid in nature. Overall, this study highlights the complexity of the movement and offers a more pluralist history of the period.

Close readings of 9 contemporary Arab novelists who use Sufism as a literary strategy

Sufi characters – saints, dervishes, wanderers – occur regularly in modern Arabic literature. A select group of novelists interrogates Sufism as a system of thought and language. In the work of writers like Naguib Mahfouz, Gamal Al-Ghitany, Taher Ouettar, Ibrahim Al-Koni, Mahmud Al-Mas’adi and Tayeb Salih we see a strong intertextual relationship with the Sufi masters of the past, including Al-Hallaj, Ibn Arabi, Al-Niffari and Al-Suhrawardi.

This relationship interrogates the limits of the creative self, individuality, rationality and all the possibilities offered by literature. In this dialogue with the mystical heritage, these novelists seek a way of preserving a self under siege from the overwhelming forces of oppression and reaction that characterised the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

This book examines the phenomenon of the post-civil war Anglophone Lebanese fictional narrative. The texts chosen for study have been produced in, and are substantially about, life in exile. They therefore deal not only with the brutal civil strife in Lebanon (1975–1990) but with one of its crucial and long-standing by-products: expatriation. Syrine Hout shows how these texts characterise a distinctly new literary and cultural trend and have founded an Anglophone Lebanese diasporic literature.

The authors discussed in the book are Rabih Alameddine, Tony Hanania, Rawi Hage, Nada Awar Jarra, Patricia Sarrafian Ward and Nathalie Ab-Ezzi. In her exploration of their writings Hout teases out the different meanings and reformulations of home, be it Lebanon as a nation, a house, a host country, an irretrievable pre-war childhood, a state of in-between dwelling, a portable state of mind, and/or a utopian ideal.

A nuanced understanding of literary imaginings of masculinity and femininity in the Egyptian novel

Gender studies in Arabic literature have become equated with women's writing, leaving aside the possibility of a radical rethinking of the Arabic literary canon and Arab cultural history. While the 'woman question' in the Arabic novel has received considerable attention, the 'male question' has gone largely unnoticed. Now, Hoda Elsadda bucks that trend.

Foregrounding voices that have been marginalised alongside canonical works, she engages with new directions in the novel tradition.

Sheds new light on key debates, including:

• The project of nation-building in the modern period
• The process of inclusion and exclusion in canon formation
• The geopolitics of definitions of national or cultural identity in the global world
• The conceptual discourses on gender and nation
• The meaning of national identity in a global context