Hoda Elsadda is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cairo University, and co-founder and Chair of the Board of the Women and Memory Forum. Previously, she held a Chair in the Study of the Contemporary Arab World at the University of Manchester. She is a widely published scholar and activist and her work has focused on Arab and Muslim women’s history and narratives, comparative literature and feminist issues.

Elsadda brilliantly upends standing understandings of the Arabic novel. Nuanced and incisive, she dissects over a century of Egyptian Arabic novels, demonstrating that the liberal national elite’s gendered imaginations of the nation shaped the literary canon. She convincingly argues that national political projects must imagine themselves through cultural production and that both are systematically shot through with gendered constructions of power.

• Introduction: Gender, nation and the canon of the Arabic novelPart I1. Beginnings: Discourses on Ideal Manhood and Ideal Womanhood2. The New Man: Conflicting Masculinities in the Fiction of Haikal, al-Mazini and a-Rafi'I3. Tawfiq al-Hakim and the Civilizational NovelPart II4. Naguib Mahfouz's Trilogy: A National Allegory5. Latifa al-Zayyat: Gender and Nationalist Politics6. Defeated Masculinities in Sonallah IbrahimPart III7. The Personal is Political: Debating the New Writing in the 1990s8. The Postcolonial Nomadic Novel9. Liminal Spaces/ Liminal Identities: Hamdi Abu Golayyel, Ahmed Alaidy and Muhammad 'Ala' al-DinConclusionArabic ReferencesEnglish ReferencesIndex