Arab Culture, Identity And The Novel: Genre, Identity And Agency In Egyptian Fiction (routledge Studies In Middle Eastern Literatures)

ARAB CULTURE AND THE NOVEL Arab Culture and the Novel explores the status and role of the novel in modern Arab culture. It postulates the historical experience of modern Egypt as largely representative of the general condition of other Arab, Islamic, and postcolonial nation-states, especially as these wrestle with the perennial quest for a viable sense of personal and collective identity in modernity. One of the book’s major theses is that certain generic properties of the novel, such as its constitutive interest in the individual as an autonomous agent of moral, ethical, political, and sexual choices and desires appear incompatible with entrenched beliefs and norms of traditional Arab society and culture. How the Egyptian novel reconciles this proactive, discursive agency with the aesthetic imperatives of the literary genre is a major concern of this study. The book tackles such broad questions through sustained textual analysis and close reading of a significant number of Egyptian novels. It thus consciously situates the literary text at the heart of the critical performance. Ultimately, the will of the Arabic novel is to imagine the unthinkable and to reinstate in the Arab public debate topics long banished from there, such as the body, sexuality, religious difference, and political dissent may bespeak the absence of a viable Arab civil society and a crippling cultural impasse. Could the Arabic novel be the harbinger of such a civil society and the cultural lever to transport it across, and beyond, the historical impasse? Muhammad Siddiq is Professor at the Department for Near Eastern Studies, University of California, Berkeley, USA. ROUTLEDGE STUDIES IN MIDDLE EASTERN LITERATURES Editors James E. Montgomery University of Cambridge Roger Allen University of Pennsylvania Philip F. Kennedy New York University Routledge Studies in Middle Eastern Literatures is a monograph series devoted to aspects of the literatures of the Near and Middle East and North Africa both modern and pre-modern. It is hoped that the provision of such a forum will lead to a greater emphasis on the comparative study of the literatures of this area, although studies devoted to one literary or linguistic region are warmly encouraged. It is the editors’ objective to foster the comparative and multi-disciplinary investigation of the written and oral literary products of this area. 1. SHEHERAZADE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS Eva Sallis 5. MAKING THE GREAT BOOK OF SONGS Hilary Kilpatrick 2. THE PALESTINIAN NOVEL Ibrahim Taha 6. THE NOVEL AND THE RURAL IMAGINARY IN EGYPT, 1880–1985 Samah Selim 3. OF DISHES AND DISCOURSE Geert Jan van Gelder 4. MEDIEVAL ARABIC PRAISE POETRY Beatrice Gruendler 7. IBN ABI TAHIR TAYFUR AND ARABIC WRITERLY CULTURE A ninth-century bookman in Baghdad Shawkat M. Toorawa 8. RELIGIOUS PERSPECTIVES IN MODERN MUSLIM AND JEWISH LITERATURES Edited by Glenda Abramson and Hilary Kilpatrick 9. ARABIC POETRY Trajectories of modernity and tradition Muhsin J. al-Musawi 10. MEDIEVAL ANDALUSIAN COURTLY CULTURE IN THE MEDITERRANEAN Three ladies and a lover Cynthia Robinson 11. WRITING AND REPRESENTATION IN MEDIEVAL ISLAM Muslim Horizons Julia Bray 12. NATIONALISM, ISLAM AND WORLD LITERATURE Sites of confluence in the writings of Mahmud al-Masadi Mohamed-Salah Omri 13. THE ORAL AND THE WRITTEN IN EARLY ISLAM Gregor Schoeler Translated by Uwe Vagelpohl Edited by James Montgomery 14. LITERATURE, JOURNALI