Series: Edinburgh Studies in Modern Arabic Literature

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...

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...

This 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...

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. Post-War Anglophone Lebanese Fiction by Syrine Hout shows...

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. The Arab Nahdah by 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....

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 particular 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...