Lebanese Post-Civil War Novel

Felix Lang is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Arabic Literature and Culture at the University of Marburg, Germany.

"This book is a well researched and serious study of two decades of Lebanese novelistic production in English, French, and Arabic. Lang's frank discussion of the forces at play in the Lebanese literary field brings out the grain of generational literary production in Lebanon. His deft analyses of the civil war theme acknowledges but goes beyond trauma theory and 'the memory industry.' His book will appeal to literary critics, anthropologists, and humanists interested in the cultural life of the Levant as well as those interested in next-generation trauma studies." - Ken Seigneurie, Professor of World Literature, Simon Fraser University, Canada "Felix Lang brings together several theoretical tools, mainly -but not only- Pierre Bourdieu's sociological analysis of the literary field as a locus of struggle for symbolical power. We discover with this book how the notions of memory and trauma are being used and remodeled by these writers, and we feel compelled to read, re-read, or teach the great novels of the likes of Elias Khoury, Rachid El Daif, Hoda Barakat or Rawi Hage from new perspectives." - Richard Jacquemond, Professor of Modern Arabic Language and Literature, Aix-Marseille Universite, France

• Introduction PART I: THE LEBANESE LITERARY FIELD1. Newspapers, Prizes and Politics: The Field's Institutions and the Global and Regional Context2. What Makes a Good Novel in Lebanon? The Values of the FieldPART II: "WE'RE ALL IN THE DARK" - THE FIRST GENERATION OF (POST-) WAR AUTHORS3. The Civil War Novel and the Break with Tradition4. Revolutionaries Turned Writers: A Secular Left-Wing Habitus5. Destruction and Deconstruction: Forms of Literary RememberingPART III: GHOSTS IN THE ARCHIVE - THE SECOND GENERATION OF POSTWAR AUTHORS6. The Civil War Novel as Gateway to the Literary Field7. Humanist Commitment: A New Habitus8. Archive, Trauma and Reconstruction: New Forms of Literary RememberingConclusion: Whose Truth, Whose Power?Appendix A: List of Authors Appendix B: List of Novels