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Provides new and original analysis on how Lebanese francophone women authors wrote about the Lebanese civil war

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 "e;bare life"e; 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.

This is an in-depth, original survey of religion in the modern Arabic novel. Tracing the relationship from the genesis of the form in the early twentieth century to present, Phillips provides a thematic exploration of the push and pull between religion and secularism as it played out on the pages of the Egyptian novel.

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.

Six years before the Egyptian revolution of January 2011, many young Egyptians had resorted to blogging as a means of self-expression and literary creativity. Such blogs are explored here as forms of digital literature, combining literary analysis and interviews with the authors.

Examines one of the most controversial poetic forms in Arabic: the Arabic prose poemWhen the modernist movement in Arabic poetry was launched in the 1940s, it threatened to blur the distinctions between poetry and everything else. The Arabic prose poem is probably the most subversive and extreme manifestation of this blurring, often described as an oxymoron, a non-genre, an anti-genre, a miracle and even a conspiracy.This 'new genre' is here explored as a poetic practice and as a critical lens which gave rise to a profound, contentious and continuing debate about the definition of an Arabic poem, its limits, and its relation to its readers. Huda Fakhreddine examines the history of the prose poem, its claims of autonomy and distance from its socio-political context, and the anxiety and scandal it generated.Key Features¿ Examines the 'new genre' of the prose poem as a poetic practice and as a critical lens¿ Adopts a case-study approach to a number of poets, including: Adonis, Muhammad al-Maghut, Salim Barakat, Mahmoud Darwish and Wadi Sa¿adeh¿ Adopts a comparative approach which operates across time periods and genres, racial identity and cultural traditionsHuda J. Fakhreddine is Associate Professor of Arabic literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Metapoesis in the Arabic Tradition: From Modernists to Muhdathun (2015).

Looks in depth at four authors - Abd al-Malik Nuri, Gha'ib Tu'ma Farman, Mahdi Isa al-Saqr and Fu'ad al-Takarli - who started writing in Iraq in or around the 1950s to explore a pivotal moment in Iraqi novel writing and a neglected area of postcolonial fi

Based on close readings of texts, Zeina Halabi counters the prevalent reading of late 20th-century Arabic literature as a neoliberal, apolitical, fragmented discourse.

Meat Markets articulates the emergent `nonhuman thought developed across literatures of the long nineteenth century and inflecting recent critical theories of abject life and animality.

Drawing on memoirs, testimonies, autobiographical novels, poetic autobiography, journals, and diaries, Nasser examines solitude and national struggles in contemporary Arab autobiography.

This book examines the diverse uses of conspiracy theory in Egyptian fiction since the early twentieth century. Read against the historical and intertextual backgrounds of individual authors and their works, conspiracy theory emerges not as a single, rigid ideology, but as a style of writing that is equal parts literary and political.

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.

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.

Xu Xu and Wumingshi were among the most widely read authors in China during and after the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945). This groundbreaking book re-establishes their importance within the popular Chinese literature of the 1940s with in-depth analyses of their innovative short stories and novels.

Traces, contextualizes, and analyses the making of the late President of Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser's image(s) in creative productions including novels, short stories, autobiographies and film.

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.

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 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.

Over the last 40 years, autobiography in Arab societies has 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 offers a novel theoretical framework to these various modes of autobiographical cultural production.

Exploring the ways in which writers utilize the spaces of the city "e; joining the factual with the imaginary "e; 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 idealized city, the city through panoramic views and pedestrian acts, the city as sexualized 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.

Explores discourses on gender and representations of women in modern Iraqi fiction. By exploring discourses on gender in both propaganda and high art fictional writings by Iraqis, this book offers an alternative narrative of the literary and cultural history of Iraq.

Traces the history of ba'thist discourses on women and state patronage of the novel, and explores secular and religious literary responsesIn an effort to expand its readership and increase support for its pan-Arab project, the Iraqi Ba'th almost completely eradicated illiteracy among women. During the country's continuous wars, female writers found the state presenting them with both opportunities and obstacles, as the 'woman question' became a site of contention between those who would advocate the progressiveness of the Ba'th and those who would stress its repressiveness and immorality. By exploring discourses on women in both propaganda and high art fictional writings by Iraqis, this book offers an alternative narrative of the literary and cultural history of Iraq.Key Features¿ Includes hitherto marginalised voices in Arabic literary scholarship, such as religious writings by Iraqi Shia women¿ Challenges canonical views of modern Arabic literature by studying propaganda texts such as the novels of Saddam Hussein and the state-sponsored novels of the Iran-Iraq War¿ Uses the concept of 'paratexts' in order to better understand how political works circulate and function as either resistance or collaboration¿ Relates to broader regional issues such as national identity and the status of women in Arabic societiesHawraa Al-Hassan is Research Associate at the Centre of Islamic Studies, University of Cambridge.

Six years before the Egyptian revolution of January 2011, many young Egyptians had resorted to blogging as a means of self-expression and literary creativity. Such blogs are explored here as forms of digital literature, combining literary analysis and interviews with the authors.

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

Evaluates the East-West encounter portrayed in Maghrebi literature from colonial times to the post-9/11 period.