This book examines how the process of nation-building in Egypt helped transform Egypt from an Ottoman province to an Arabic speaking national community. Through the discussion of the life and works of the prominent writer `A'isha Taymur, Hatem gives insight into how literature and the changing gender roles of women and men contributed to the definition and/or development of a sense of community.

This book examines how the process of nation-building in Egypt helped transform Egypt from an Ottoman province to an Arabic speaking national community. Through the discussion of the life and works of€ the prominent writer `A'isha Taymur, €Hatem gives insight€into how literature and the changing gender roles of women and men contributed to the definition and/or development of a sense of community.

This book examines how the process of nation-building in Egypt helped transform Egypt from an Ottoman province to an Arabic speaking national community. Through the discussion of the life and works of the prominent writer `A'isha Taymur, Hatem gives insight into how literature and the changing gender roles of women and men contributed to the definition and/or development of a sense of community.

The book provides a unique account of the very active economic, social and political roles of nineteenth-century women.

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

Zaynab Fawwaz (c.1860-1914) was as a forceful voice in support of women's rights to education and work choices in colonial-era Egypt. Her volume of 453 women's lives, al-Durr al-manthur fi tabaqat rabbat al-khudur (Pearls scattered in times and places: Classes of ladies of cloistered spaces, 1893-6) featuring Boudicca, Catherine the Great, Zaynab (the granddaughter of the Prophet Muhammad), Victoria Woodhull, the Turkish poet Sirri Hanim and many others built on the Arabic-Islamic biographical tradition to produce a work for women in the modern era, grafting European, Turkish, Arab, and Indian life narratives, amongst others onto Arabic literary patternsIn Classes of Ladies of Cloistered Spaces Marilyn Booth argues that Fawwazs work was less exemplary biography than feminist history, in its exploration of achievement but also of patriarchal trauma in the lives of women across times and places. She traces Fawwazs creative use of her sources, her presentation of biographical narratives in the context of the political essays she wrote in the Arabic press, her publicised dialogue with the President of the Board of Lady Managers of the 1893 World Columbian Exposition where she attempted to send the volume and how her inscription of a feminine ancient history diverged from that of men writing history in 1890s Egypt.

The Ottoman Canon and the Construction of Arabic and Turkish Literatures fleshes out the Ottoman canon's multilingual character to call for a literary history that can reassess and even move beyond categories that many critics take for granted, such as 'classical Arabic literature' and 'Ottoman literature'. It gives a historically contextualised close reading of works from authors who have been studied as pionneers of Arabic and Turkish literatures, such as Ziya Pasha, Jurji Zaydan, Ma?ruf al-Rusafi and Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar. The Ottoman Canon analyses how these authors prepared the arguments and concepts that shape how we study Arabic and Turkish literatures today as they reassessed the relationship among the Ottoman canon's linguistic traditions. Furthermore, The Ottoman Canon examines the Ottoman reception of pre-Ottoman poets, such as Kab ibn Zuhayr, hence opening up new research avenues for Arabic literature, Ottoman studies and comparative literature.