Studying Modern Arabic Literature

This book is about the career and academic legacy of Mustafa Badawi who transformed the study of Modern Arabic Literature in Western academe in the second half of the 20th century. During the decades after his appointment in Oxford in 1964, he communicated to students and the wider public the extent to which this literature is such a vibrant component of global culture, freeing it from the more traditional approaches of academic Orientalism. The first section of the book is largely biographical as it describes Badawi’s early life and career in the cosmopolitan Mediterranean city of Alexandria. It also assesses his role as a public intellectual in the Arab World and the West, and considers the manner in which his initial career as a scholar of English literature affected his teaching and research in Arabic and also his role as a translator. The second section provides examples of the work of eminent scholars in the field who are adding to Badawi’s heritage, in some cases in areas of work which were developed under his tutelage.