This work covers the postcolonial in Arabic fiction. It discusses and questions a large number of novels show cultural diversity in the Arab world. It highlights engagements with postcolonial issues that relate to identity formation, the modern nation-state, individualism, and nationalism.

Traces the development of the modern Arabic novel from the 1960s to the present.

Arabic Disclosures presents readers with a comparative analysis of Arabic postcolonial autobiographical writing. In Arabic Disclosures Muhsin J. al-Musawi investigates the genre of autobiography within the modern tradition of Arabic literary writing from the early 1920s to the present. Al-Musawi notes in the introduction that the purpose of this work is not to survey the entirety of autobiographical writing in modern Arabic but rather to apply a rigorously identified set of characteristics and approaches culled from a variety of theoretical studies of the genre to a particular set of autobiographical works in Arabic, selected for their different methodologies, varying historical contexts within which they were conceived and written, and the equally varied lives experienced by the authors involved. The book begins in the larger context of autobiographical space, where the theories of Bourdieu, Bachelard, Bakhtin, and Lefebvre are laid out, and then considers the multiple ways in which a postcolonial awareness of space has impacted the writings of many of the authors whose works are examined. Organized chronologically, al-Musawi begins with the earliest modern example of autobiographical work in Ṭāhā Ḥusayn’s book, translated into English as The Stream of Days. Al-Musawi studies some of the major pioneers in the development of modern Arabic thought and literary expression: Jurjī Zaydān, Mīkḫāˀīl Nuˁaymah, Aḥmad Amīn, Salāmah Mūsā, Sayyid Quṭb, and untranslated works by the prominent critic and scholar Ḥammādī Ṣammūd, the novelist ʿĀliah Mamdūḥ, and others. He also examines the autobiographies of a number of women, including Nawāl al-Saʿdāwī and Fadwā Ṭūqān, and fiction writers. The book draws a map of Arab thought and culture in its multiple engagements with other cultures and will be useful for scholars and students of comparative literature, Arabic studies, and Middle Eastern studies, intellectual thought, and history.

Challenging prevalent conceptualizations of modernity—which treat it either as a Western ideology imposed by colonialism or as a universal narrative of progress and innovation—this study instead offers close readings of the simultaneous performances and contestations of modernity staged in works by authors such as Rifa’a al-Tahtawi, Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, Tayeb Salih, Hanan al-Shaykh, Hamdi Abu Golayyel, and Ahmad Alaidy. In dialogue with affect theory, deconstruction, and psychoanalysis, the book reveals these trials to be a violent and ongoing confrontation with and within modernity. In pointed and witty prose, El-Ariss bridges the gap between Nahda (the so-called Arab project of Enlightenment) and postcolonial and postmodern fiction.

The final volume of The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature explores the Arabic literary heritage of the little-known period from the twelfth to the beginning of the nineteenth century. Even though it was during this time that the famous Thousand and One Nights was composed, very little has been written on the literature of the period generally. In this volume Roger Allen and Donald Richards bring together some of the most distinguished scholars in the field to rectify the situation. The volume is divided into parts with the traditions of poetry and prose covered separately within both their 'elite' and 'popular' contexts. The last two sections are devoted to drama and the indigenous tradition of literary criticism. As the only work of its kind in English covering the post-classical period, this book promises to be a unique resource for students and scholars of Arabic literature for many years to come.

A nuanced understanding of literary imaginings of masculinity and femininity in the context of the 'national' canon of Egypt.

This book traces the roots of Arabic science fiction through classical and medieval Arabic literature, undertaking close readings of formative texts of Arabic science fiction via a critical framework developed from the work of Western critics of Western science fiction, Arab critics of Arabic science fiction and postcolonial theorists of literature. Ian Campbell investigates the ways in which Arabic science fiction engages with a theoretical concept he terms “double estrangement” wherein these texts provide social or political criticism through estrangement and simultaneously critique their own societies’ inability or refusal to engage in the sort of modernization that would lead the Arab world back to leadership in science and technology.