Samira Aghacy – författare

Exploring how writers utilise 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 Beirut explores the city in 16 Arabic novels focusing on the urban/rural divide, the imagined and idealised city, the city through panoramic views and pedestrian acts, the city as sexualised 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.

There are more than 15 million people aged over 65 currently living in the MENA region, yet little attention has been paid to the cultural significance of growing old. This book recognises the widespread silence by countering the critical corpus that reads modern Arabic novels as a political discourse with an emphasis on youth achievement. By assembling a range of fictional works from different parts of the Arab world that incorporate older characters, this book draws on a range of theoretical approaches to aging, particularly from the perspective of gender and feminism, to reconcile the biological and cultural understandings of old age. It reveals that there is no standard female or male experience and no single prototype of oldness in the modern Arabic novel, and that men and women manifest a multiplicity of identities, concerns, and experiences as they grow older.