No Western scholar has contributed as much to the study of modern Arabic narrative as has Roger Allen. His doctoral dissertation was the very first Oxford D.Phil. in modern Arabic literature, completed in 1968 under the supervision of Mustafa Badawi. That same year, he took a position in Arabic language and literature at the University of Pennsylvania, the oldest professorial post in Arabic in the United States. Roger Allen has been phenomenally prolific: fifty books and translations, two hundred articles and counting-on Arabic language pedagogy, on translation, on Arabic literary history, criticism and literature. He is also one of the most decorated and acclaimed translators of Arabic literature. The present volume brings together sixteen of Roger Allen's articles on modern Arabic narrative, with a focus on genre, translation and literary history, and features analyses of the works of Rashid Abu Jadrah, Bensalem Himmich, Yusuf Idris, Naguib Mahfouz, and Tayeb Salih.

This dazzling anthology features the work of seventy-nine outstanding writers from all over the Arab-speaking world, from Morocco in the west to Iraq in the east, Syria in the north to Sudan in the south. Edited by Denys Johnson-Davies, called by Edward Said “the leading Arabic-to-English translator of our time,” this treasury of Arab voices is diverse in styles and concerns, but united by a common language. It spans the full history of modern Arabic literature, from its roots in western cultural influence at the end of the nineteenth century to the present-day flowering of Naguib Mahfouz’s literary sons and daughters. Among the Egyptian writers who laid the foundation for the Arabic literary renaissance are the great Tawfik al-Hakim; the short story pioneer Mahmoud Teymour; and Yusuf Idris, who embraced Egypt’s vibrant spoken vernacular. An excerpt from the Sudanese writer Tayeb Salih’s novel Season of Migration to the North, one of the Arab world’s finest, appears alongside the Libyan writer Ibrahim al-Koni’s tales of the Tuaregs of North Africa, the Iraqi writer Mohamed Khudayir’s masterly story “Clocks Like Horses,” and the work of such women writers as Lebanon’s Hanan al-Shaykh and Morocco’s Leila Abouzeid.

"Jayyusi provides biographical information on the writers as well as a substantial introduction to the development of modern Arabic fictional genres that considers the central thematic and aesthetic concerns of Arab short story writers and novelists."--Jacket.

After formulating a theoretical foundation for the sociology of narrative genres based on the work of Bakhtin, Foucault, Goldmann, Jauss and Said, this work challenges the widely held assumption that Arabic culture stagnated before its contact with the West at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Hafez traces the revival to the mid-eighteenth century and follows its development throughout the Arab world, showing how the emergence of a new reading public with its distinct 'world view' induced the process of the transformation and genesis of a new literary discourse. This is followed by a study of the dynamics of this process and an outline of the various stages of the formation and transformation of the new narrative discourse until it culminates in the production of a sophisticated and mature narrative. The Genesis of Arabic Narrative Discourse shifts the terms of the debate on the rise of narrative from formal analysis to an analysis of social formation, clarifying many of the issues which have long dogged critical discussion. It changes the nature of literary history by overlaying its dry chronology with the vivid socio-cultural dimension and by achieving a fine balance between the textual and contextual. It tests its major theoretical suppositions by tracing the historical development of narrative discourse, as well as through a detailed and sensitive analysis of a short story in a manner that changes the nature of Arabic literary criticism and puts it on an equal footing with modern critical discourse in Western culture.

This book will present close readings of three contemporary Arabic novelists - an Egyptian (Gamal Al-Ghitany), an Algerian (Taher Ouettar) and a Touareg Libyan (Ibrahim Al-Koni) - who have all turned to Sufism as a literary strategy aimed at negotiating i

Understanding the complexities of Arab politics, history, and culture has never been more important for North American readers. Yet even as Arabic literature is increasingly being translated into English, the modern Arabic literary tradition is still often treated as other--controversial, dangerous, difficult, esoteric, or exotic. This volume examines modern Arabic literature in context and introduces creative teaching methods that reveal the literature's richness, relevance, and power to anglophone students. Addressing the complications of translation head on, the volume interweaves such important issues such as gender, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and the status of Arabic literature in world literature. Essays cover writers from the recent past, like Emile Habiby and Tayeb Salih; contemporary Palestinian, Egyptian, and Syrian literatures; and the literature of the nineteenth-century Nahda.

Covering 60 years of materials, this bibliography cites translations, studies, and other writings, which represent Iraq's national literature, including recent works of numerous Iraqi writers living in Western exile. The volume serves as a guide to three interrelated data: o Translations that have appeared since 1950, as books or as individual items (poems, short stories, novel extracts, plays, diaries) in print-and non-print publications in Iraq and other Arab and English-speaking countries, including Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. o Relevant studies and other secondary sources including selected reviews and author interviews, which cover Iraqi literature and writers. o The scope of displacement or dispersion of Iraqi writers, artists, and other intellectuals who have been uprooted and are now living in exile in Arab or other Western countries. By drawing attention to a largely overlooked but relevant and extensive literature accessible in English, this first of its kind book will serve as an invaluable guide to students of contemporary Iraq, modern Arabic literature, and other fields such as women's studies, postcolonial studies, third world literature, American-Arab/Muslim Relations, and Diaspora studies.