Robin Ostle – författare

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.

Enormous political and social changes brought about by modernization have naturally found expression in the literatures of the Near and Middle East. The contributors to this book, first published in 1991, trace the development of modern literary sensibility, in Turkish, Arabic, Persian and modern Hebrew. It is argued that the period can be divided into three broad phases – the age of translation after 1850, when formerly self-sufficient elites throughout the region began to reach out to the West for new ideas and stylistic models; the surge of romantic nationalism after the First World War and the decline of imperialism; and the modern period after 1950, a time of growing self-awareness and self-definition among writers against an often violent background of inter- and intra-state conflict. The product of different nations, races and traditions, there are nevertheless constant themes in the literatures of this period – the colonial heritage, nationalism, justice, poverty and wealth, migration from country to city, confrontation between self and other, and between East and West, collapse and rebirth.

Enormous political and social changes brought about by modernization have naturally found expression in the literatures of the Near and Middle East. The contributors to this book, first published in 1991, trace the development of modern literary sensibility, in Turkish, Arabic, Persian and modern Hebrew. It is argued that the period can be divided into three broad phases – the age of translation after 1850, when formerly self-sufficient elites throughout the region began to reach out to the West for new ideas and stylistic models; the surge of romantic nationalism after the First World War and the decline of imperialism; and the modern period after 1950, a time of growing self-awareness and self-definition among writers against an often violent background of inter- and intra-state conflict. The product of different nations, races and traditions, there are nevertheless constant themes in the literatures of this period – the colonial heritage, nationalism, justice, poverty and wealth, migration from country to city, confrontation between self and other, and between East and West, collapse and rebirth.