Edinburgh Studies in Modern Arabic Literature – serie

Gender studies in Arabic literature has become equated with women's writing, leaving aside the possibility of a radical rethinking of the Arabic literary canon and Arab cultural history. While the 'woman question' in the Arabic novel has received considerable attention, the 'male question' has gone largely unnoticed. Now, Hoda Elsadda bucks that trend to give us a nuanced understanding of literary imaginings of masculinity and femininity in the Egyptian novel. Foregrounding voices that have been marginalised alongside canonical works, she engages with new directions in the novel tradition.

To understand today's Arab thinking, you need to go back to the beginnings of modernity: the nahdah or Arab renaissance of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Abdulrazzak Patel enhances our understanding of the nahdah and its intellectuals, looking back to its origins in the 1700s and taking into account important internal factors alongside external forces. He explores the key factors that contributed to the rise and development of the nahdah, he introduces the humanist movement of the period that was the driving force behind much of the linguistic, literary and educational activity. Drawing on intellectual history, literary history and postcolonial studies, he argues that the nahdah was the product of native development and foreign assistance and that nahdah reformist thought was hybrid in nature. Overall, this study highlights the complexity of the movement and offers a more pluralist history of the period.

This volume is designed as an introduction to the contemporary Egyptian author Sonallah Ibrahim, one of the most important Arabic novelists of the modern era, with an unrivalled reputation for independence and integrity among contemporary Egyptian writers. The first study in any language devoted exclusively to Sonallah Ibrahim, the volume discusses each of the author’s novels individually, beginning with the seminal Tilka al-ra’iha [That Smell] (1966) and ending with al-Jalid [Ice] (2011). Each work is discussed individually in its literary, social, historical and political context. The volume traces the evolution of Sonallah Ibrahim’s work in terms both of their themes and of their literary technique, and concludes with an attempt at an overall evaluation of the author’s contribution to the contemporary Egyptian novel. Paul Starkey’s account shows how innovative and stylistically rich the Arabic novel has become over a period of some fifty years, beyond the better-known work of writers such as Naguib Mahfouz and Yusuf Idris. As such, the volume will serve as an introduction not only to the individual author but also to the development of Egyptian (and, more generally, Arabic) literature over the last half century.

Sufi characters – saints, dervishes, wanderers – occur regularly in modern Arabic literature. A select group of novelists to interrogate Sufism as a system of thought and language. In the work of writers like Naguib Mahfouz, Gamal Al-Ghitany, Taher Ouettar, Ibrahim Al-Koni, Mahmud Al-Mas’adi and Tayeb Salih we see a strong intertextual relationship with the Sufi masters of the past, including Al-Hallaj, Ibn Arabi, Al-Niffari and Al-Suhrawardi. This relationship becomes a means of interrogating the limits of the creative self, individuality, rationality and the manifold possibilities offered by literature, seeking in a dialogue with the mystical heritage a way of preserving a self under siege from the overwhelming forces of oppression and reaction that have characterised the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

This exploration of the work of Iraqi novelists begins with the early pioneering works and then moves towards an outline of the vibrant Baghdad cultural scene during the 1940s and 1950s. It pays articular attention to detailed textual analysis and the evaluation and comparison of the aesthetic and poetic qualities of the key works of the four writers who form the central subject of the book: Abd al-Malik Nuri (1921–98), Gha’ib Tu‘ma Farman (1927–90), Mahdi Isa al-Saqr (1927–2006) and Fu’ad al-Takarli (1927–2008) – all of whom began to write in or around the pivotal decade of the 1950s.It is in these writers’ works that Iraqi fiction came of age and reached artistic maturity. The best of them are among the most complex portrayals of the particularities of life in Iraq and the human condition in general to come out of the Arab world.

Rifa'a Rafi' al-Tahtawi (1801-73) was one of the most extraordinary scholars of his age, and the first Muslim to try to incorporate Western ideas and innovations into his native society. In spite of all this, it is surprising that many aspects of his works and thought remain under explored. This work addresses this neglect

This book examines the phenomenon of the post-civil war Anglophone Lebanese fictional narrative. The texts chosen for study have been produced in, and are substantially about, life in exile. They therefore deal not only with the brutal civil strife in Lebanon (1975-1990) but with one of its crucial and long-standing by-products: expatriation. Syrine Hout shows how these texts characterise a distinctly new literary and cultural trend and have founded an Anglophone Lebanese diasporic literature. The authors discussed in the book are Rabih Alameddine, Tony Hanania, Rawi Hage, Nada Awar Jarrar, Patricia Sarrafian Ward and Nathalie Abi-Ezzi. In her exploration of their writings Hout teases out the different meanings and reformulations of home, be it Lebanon as a nation, a house, a host country, an irretrievable pre-war childhood, a state of in-between dwelling, a portable state of mind, and/or a utopian ideal.

Maghrebi literature published in the first half of the twentieth century is a subject that seldom receives focused scholarly treatment. This is partly due to limited availability of the books, some of which were printed in as few as fifty copies. Zahia Smail Salhi tracked down these rare works and put them in the spotlight for the first time here. Through close textual analysis and in-depth engagement with religious and socio-political contexts, Smail Salhi determines whether these texts belong to a collective formation we may call ‘Occidentalism’. In so doing, this book reintegrates the pre-1945 Maghrebi novels into the history and study of modern Arabic literature.

Sufi characters – saints, dervishes, wanderers – occur regularly in modern Arabic literature. A select group of novelists to interrogate Sufism as a system of thought and language. In the work of writers like Naguib Mahfouz, Gamal Al-Ghitany, Taher Ouettar, Ibrahim Al-Koni, Mahmud Al-Mas’adi and Tayeb Salih we see a strong intertextual relationship with the Sufi masters of the past, including Al-Hallaj, Ibn Arabi, Al-Niffari and Al-Suhrawardi. This relationship becomes a means of interrogating the limits of the creative self, individuality, rationality and the manifold possibilities offered by literature, seeking in a dialogue with the mystical heritage a way of preserving a self under siege from the overwhelming forces of oppression and reaction that have characterised the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

The last three decades in Iraqi history can be summarized in these words: dictatorship, war and occupation. After the fall of Saddam’s regime Iraqi novelists are not only writing about the occupation and the current disintegration of Iraq but are also revisiting previous wars that devastated their lives. This book examines how recent Iraqi fiction about war depicts the Iraqi subject in its relation to war, coercion, subjugation and occupation. The theoretical medieval concept of the homo sacer, the killable, as defined by Giorgio Agamben is used to explore the lives and the experiences of different war actors such as the soldier, the war deserter, the camp detainee and the suicide bomber depicted in their "bare life" as men doomed to death in the necropolitical context. War and Occupation in Iraqi Fiction is an exploration of fictional works by a new generation of leading Iraqi authors such as Ali Badr, Shakir Nuri, Najm Wali, Hdiya Hussein and others. It brings to light the overarching continuum in the production of homines sacri in Iraq. Instances of homo sacer under the dictatorship are complemented by new instances found in the camp and under the state of exception of the occupation and the war on terror.

Since the 1990s, Arabic exile literature in Europe has increasingly become a literature written from the perspective of refugees, asylum seekers, undocumented migrants and others who are situated outside normatively defined citizenship. In this book, Johanna Sellman analyses the changing aesthetic and political dimensions of Arabic exile literature and demonstrates how frameworks such as east–west cultural encounters, political commitment and modernist understandings of exile – which were dominant in 20th-century Arabic exile literature – have been giving way to writing that explores the dynamics of forced migration and the liminal spaces of borders and borderlands.

Since the 1990s, Arabic exile literature in Europe has increasingly become a literature written from the perspective of refugees, asylum seekers, undocumented migrants and others who are situated outside normatively defined citizenship. In this book, Johanna Sellman analyses the changing aesthetic and political dimensions of Arabic exile literature and demonstrates how frameworks such as east west cultural encounters, political commitment and modernist understandings of exile which were dominant in 20th-century Arabic exile literature have been giving way to writing that explores the dynamics of forced migration and the liminal spaces of borders and borderlands.

The monograph studies the Arab mahjari (emigre) writer Gibran Khalil Gibran (Kahlil Gibran) by examining his oeuvre as bilingual Arabic literature beyond biographical and culturalist approaches. It situates Gibran within his worldly contexts to unveil and analyse how the particular and the universal dialectically intersect in his multifarious work, including poetry, short stories, essays, plays and letters. What emerges is a post-religious poet who is both modern and critical of modernity, a creative but anxious bilingual writer, and a critical-nationalist intellectual embedded in the nahda or Arab renaissance. In its situated close readings of Gibran's work in both languages and across genres and contexts, the book reveals what is both absent and absented in its Anglo-American reception, demonstrating that there is much more to Gibran than his famous book The Prophet. It also probes this reception alongside its Arabic counterpart, highlighting and interrogating the multiple conditions of reading that have produced different functions of Gibran.

This monograph studies the Arab mahjari (émigré) writer Gibran Khalil Gibran (Kahlil Gibran) by examining his oeuvre as bilingual Arabic literature beyond biographical and culturalist approaches. It situates Gibran within his worldly contexts to unveil and analyse how the particular and the universal dialectically intersect in his multifarious work, including poetry, short stories, essays, plays and letters. What emerges is a post-religious poet who is both modern and critical of modernity, a creative but anxious bilingual writer, and a critical-nationalist intellectual embedded in the nahda or Arab renaissance. In its situated close readings of Gibran’s work in both languages and across genres and contexts, the book reveals what is both absent and absented in its Anglo-American reception, demonstrating that there is much more to Gibran than his famous book The Prophet. It also probes this reception alongside its Arabic counterpart, highlighting and interrogating the multiple conditions of reading that have produced different functions of Gibran.

Examines the circulation of literature, routes of comparison and the legacies of transcontinental tiesTraces cultural exchange between Latin America and the Arab world in the 20th and 21st centuries Examines the relationship between Latin American and Arabic literatures and the circulation of literature across continents with historical, cultural and literary tiesAnalyses works by Gabriel Garc a M rquez, H ctor Abad Faciolince, Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Alberto Ruy S nchez, Naguib Mahfouz, Elias Khoury, Sonallah Ibrahim, Mohamed Makhzangi, Jabbar Yussin Hussin and Hassan BlasimSince the 19th century, Arab migration from the Ottoman Empire to Latin America and Latin American travel to the Arab world has created transcontinental routes and in the late 20th century, the translation of Latin American classics into Arabic flourished in the Arab world. Drawing on Latin American and Arabic novels, travelogues, memoirs, short stories and chronicles from Cuba, Colombia, Mexico, Guatemala, Egypt, Lebanon and Iraq, Tahia Abdel Nasser shows how cultural exchange between Latin America and the Arab world cemented historical and diplomatic ties. She also explores how a new cadre of men of letters poets, writers and intellectuals shaped Arab Latin American encounters in the late 20th century.

Since the 19th century, Arab migration from the Ottoman Empire to Latin America and Latin American travel to the Arab world has created transcontinental routes and in the late 20th century, the translation of Latin American classics into Arabic flourished in the Arab world. Drawing on Latin American and Arabic novels, travelogues, memoirs, short stories and chronicles from Cuba, Colombia, Mexico, Guatemala, Egypt, Lebanon and Iraq, Tahia Abdel Nasser shows how cultural exchange between Latin America and the Arab world cemented historical and diplomatic ties. She also explores how a new cadre of men of letters poets, writers and intellectuals shaped Arab Latin American encounters in the late 20th century.

Examines tangible experiences of war and occupation in recent Iraqi fictionExplores fictional works by a new generation of leading Iraqi authors such as Ali Badr, Shakir Nuri, Najm Wali and Hdiya HusseinProvides a historical contextualization of the Iraqi novel before and after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regimePresents an analytical and critical study of a selected corpus of novels about war and occupation in IraqExplores tangible experiences of war and occupation such as desertion, camp detention and suicide bombing in the Iraqi novelThe last three decades in Iraqi history can be summarized in these words: dictatorship, war and occupation. After the fall of Saddam's regime Iraqi novelists are not only writing about the occupation and the current disintegration of Iraq but are also revisiting previous wars that devastated their lives. This book examines how recent Iraqi fiction about war depicts the Iraqi subject in its relation to war, coercion, subjugation and occupation. The theoretical medieval concept of the homo sacer, the killable, as defined by Giorgio Agamben is used to explore the lives and the experiences of different war actors such as the soldier, the war deserter, the camp detainee and the suicide bomber depicted in their 'bare life' as men doomed to death in the necropolitical context.War and Occupation in Iraqi Fiction is an exploration of fictional works by a new generation of leading Iraqi authors such as Ali Badr, Shakir Nuri, Najm Wali, Hdiya Hussein and others. It brings to light the overarching continuum in the production of homines sacri in Iraq. Instances of homo sacer under the dictatorship are complemented by new instances found in the camp and under the state of exception of the occupation and the war on terror.

Arab migration to the Gulf unfurled in the midst of manifold political and economic changes and had crucial social ramifications all over the Arab world. Through the examination of a selection of Arabic migration narratives set from the 1970s onwards, this monograph asks: how have Arab writers responded to this phenomenon and what are the thematic and formal characteristics of literary attempts to represent the rarely acknowledged and complex affects that have been generated in subjective experiences of Gulf migration?By foregrounding centre–periphery dynamics within the Arab world, the analysis decentres the emphasis on the encounter with the ‘West’ in scholarship on migration in Arab literature and culture. It challenges prevailing discourses on the Gulf and demonstrates the role of fiction in nuancing essentialist images of a uniform Gulf migrant experience.

The rich and lengthy Arabic corpus of fantastic fiction is one hidden in plain sight. In more broad studies of both fantastic fiction and Arabic literary and cultural history, it is notably absent. It is rarely, if ever, read as a corpus, much less as one with a rich, meandering, and turbulent history.As fantastic modes have risen in global popularity over the past two decades, this book joins the revisionist wave of exciting critical interventions questioning the cornerstones of cultural history. It reads the current proliferation of Arabic fantastic stories as a potent return of the repressed and illuminates the persistence of premodern forms and narratives in contemporary cultural practice. Moreover, the book proposes essential categories, epistemes and historical timelines for effectively understanding the corpus of the modern Arabic fantastic, arguing that the fantastic is becoming a modern realism of our times.

This original exploration of Arab autobiographical discourse investigates various modes of cultural identity that have emerged in Arab societies in the last 40 years. During this period, autobiographical texts moved away from exemplary life narratives and toward more unorthodox techniques such as erotic memoir writing, postmodernist self-fragmentation, cinematographic self-projection and blogging. Valerie Anishchenkova argues that the Arabic autobiographical genre has evolved into a mobile, unrestricted category arming authors with narrative tools to articulate their selfhood.Reading works from Arab nations such as Egypt, Iraq, Morocco, Syria and Lebanon, Anishchenkova connects the century’s rapid political and ideological developments to increasing autobiographical experimentation in Arabic works. The immense scope of her study also forces consideration of film and online forms of self-representation and builds a new theoretical framework for these modes of autobiographical cultural production.

This book examines the phenomenon of the post-civil war Anglophone Lebanese fictional narrative. The texts chosen for study have been produced in, and are substantially about, life in exile. They therefore deal not only with the brutal civil strife in Lebanon (1975-1990) but with one of its crucial and long-standing by-products: expatriation. Syrine Hout shows how these texts characterise a distinctly new literary and cultural trend and have founded an Anglophone Lebanese diasporic literature. The authors discussed in the book are Rabih Alameddine, Tony Hanania, Rawi Hage, Nada Awar Jarrar, Patricia Sarrafian Ward and Nathalie Abi-Ezzi. In her exploration of their writings Hout teases out the different meanings and reformulations of home, be it Lebanon as a nation, a house, a host country, an irretrievable pre-war childhood, a state of in-between dwelling, a portable state of mind, and/or a utopian ideal.

To understand today's Arab thinking, you need to go back to the beginnings of modernity: the nahdah or Arab renaissance of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Abdulrazzak Patel enhances our understanding of the nahdah and its intellectuals, looking back to its origins in the 1700s and taking into account important internal factors alongside external forces. He explores the key factors that contributed to the rise and development of the nahdah, he introduces the humanist movement of the period that was the driving force behind much of the linguistic, literary and educational activity. Drawing on intellectual history, literary history and postcolonial studies, he argues that the nahdah was the product of native development and foreign assistance and that nahdah reformist thought was hybrid in nature. Overall, this study highlights the complexity of the movement and offers a more pluralist history of the period.

Gender studies in Arabic literature has become equated with women's writing, leaving aside the possibility of a radical rethinking of the Arabic literary canon and Arab cultural history. While the 'woman question' in the Arabic novel has received considerable attention, the 'male question' has gone largely unnoticed. Now, Hoda Elsadda bucks that trend to give us a nuanced understanding of literary imaginings of masculinity and femininity in the Egyptian novel. Foregrounding voices that have been marginalised alongside canonical works, she engages with new directions in the novel tradition.

This exploration of the work of Iraqi novelists begins with the early pioneering works and then moves towards an outline of the vibrant Baghdad cultural scene during the 1940s and 1950s. It pays articular attention to detailed textual analysis and the evaluation and comparison of the aesthetic and poetic qualities of the key works of the four writers who form the central subject of the book: Abd al-Malik Nuri (1921–98), Gha’ib Tu‘ma Farman (1927–90), Mahdi Isa al-Saqr (1927–2006) and Fu’ad al-Takarli (1927–2008) – all of whom began to write in or around the pivotal decade of the 1950s.It is in these writers’ works that Iraqi fiction came of age and reached artistic maturity. The best of them are among the most complex portrayals of the particularities of life in Iraq and the human condition in general to come out of the Arab world.

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.

In this novel and pioneering study Maya I. Kesrouany explores the move from Qur’anic to secular approaches to literature in early 20th-century Egyptian literary translations, asking what we can learn from that period and the promise that translation held for the Egyptian writers of fiction at that time. Through their early adaptations, these writers crafted a prophetic, secular vocation for the narrator that gave access to a world of linguistic creation and interpretation unavailable to the common reader or the religious cleric. This book looks at the writers’ claim to secular prophecy as it manifests itself in the adapted narrative voice of their translations to suggest an original sense of literary resistance to colonial oppression and occupation in the early Arabic novel.

The late President of Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918-1970), has been represented in many major works of Egyptian literature and film, and continues to have a presence in everyday life and discourse in the country. Omar Khalifah’s analysis of these representations focuses on how the historical character of Nasser has emerged in the Egyptian imaginary. He explores the recurrent images of Nasser in literature and film and shows how Nasser constitutes a perfect site for plural interpretations. He argues that Nasser has become a rhetorical device, a figure of speech, a trope that connotes specific images constantly invoked whenever he is mentioned. His study makes a case for literature and art to be seen as alternative archives that question, erase, distort and add to the official history of Nasser.

Identifies an emerging genre within the contemporary Egyptian novel that reflects a new consciousnessDuring colonial times the Egyptian novel invoked a sovereign nation-state and basked in its perceived unity. After independence the novel began to profess disenchantment with state practices and unequal class and gender relations, but did not disrupt the nation's imagined homogeneity. The twenty-first-century Egyptian novel, by contrast, shatters this singular view, with the rise of a new consciousness that presents Egypt as fundamentally diverse. This new consciousness responds to discourses of difference and practices of differentiation within the contexts of race, religion, class, gender, sexuality and language. It also heralds the cacophony of voices that collectively cried for social justice from Tahrir Square. Through a robust analysis of several 'new-consciousness' novels by award winning authors the book highlights their unconventional, yet coherent undertakings to foreground the marginal experiences of the Nubian, Amazigh, Bedouin, Coptic, Jewish, women and sexual minority populations in Egypt.Key FeaturesIncludes case studies of the novels of 8 authors: Idris ?Ali, Baha? ?ahir, ?Ala? al-Aswani, Yusuf Zaydan, Mu?tazz Futayha, Ashraf al-Khumaysi and Miral al-TahawiShows how these novels have taken on a mediatory role in formalising and articulating their historical momentCritically examines the recent developments within the Egyptian literary and socio-cultural arenas