Valerie Anishchenkova
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780748643400
- eISBN:
- 9781474406321
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748643400.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
This study of Arab autobiographical discourse investigates various modes of cultural identity which have emerged in Arab societies in the last 40 years. During this period, autobiographical texts ...
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This study of Arab autobiographical discourse investigates various modes of cultural identity which 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 autobiographical blogosphere. The book argues that the Arabic autobiographical genre has evolved into a mobile, unrestricted category arming authors with narrative tools to articulate their selfhood. Reading works from such Arab nations as Egypt, Iraq, Morocco, Syria, and Lebanon, the author connects the century's rapid political and ideological developments to increasing autobiographical experimentation in Arabic works. The scope of the study also forces a consideration of film and cyber forms of self-representation as new autobiographical sub-genres. The monograph offers a novel theoretical framework to these diverse modes of autobiographical cultural production and situates Arabic autobiographical discourse as an integral part of global identity-making cultural production.Less
This study of Arab autobiographical discourse investigates various modes of cultural identity which 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 autobiographical blogosphere. The book argues that the Arabic autobiographical genre has evolved into a mobile, unrestricted category arming authors with narrative tools to articulate their selfhood. Reading works from such Arab nations as Egypt, Iraq, Morocco, Syria, and Lebanon, the author connects the century's rapid political and ideological developments to increasing autobiographical experimentation in Arabic works. The scope of the study also forces a consideration of film and cyber forms of self-representation as new autobiographical sub-genres. The monograph offers a novel theoretical framework to these diverse modes of autobiographical cultural production and situates Arabic autobiographical discourse as an integral part of global identity-making cultural production.
Fabio Caiani and Catherine Cobham
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780748641413
- eISBN:
- 9780748695225
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748641413.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
This book provides a commentary on a neglected, but illuminating, area of postcolonial fiction, and makes a timely contribution to the understanding of wider Iraqi culture and society. It is designed ...
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This book provides a commentary on a neglected, but illuminating, area of postcolonial fiction, and makes a timely contribution to the understanding of wider Iraqi culture and society. It is designed to fill a gap in existing research in English on modern Arabic fiction, which has barely begun to address the work of Iraqi novelists. It first explores early pioneering works and then moves towards an outline of the vibrant Baghdad cultural scene during the 1940s and 1950s. Particular attention is paid 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 the central subject of the book: ‘Abd al-Malik Nuri (1921-1998), Gha’ib Tu‘ma Farman (1927-1990), Mahdi Isa al-Saqr (1927-2006) and Fu’ad al-Takarli (1927-2008), all of whom began to write in or around the pivotal decade of the 1950s. It is in these writers’ works that Iraqi fiction came of age and reached artistic maturity. The best of these writers’ works are among the most complex portrayals of the particularities of life in Iraq and the human condition in general to come out of the Arab world.Less
This book provides a commentary on a neglected, but illuminating, area of postcolonial fiction, and makes a timely contribution to the understanding of wider Iraqi culture and society. It is designed to fill a gap in existing research in English on modern Arabic fiction, which has barely begun to address the work of Iraqi novelists. It first explores early pioneering works and then moves towards an outline of the vibrant Baghdad cultural scene during the 1940s and 1950s. Particular attention is paid 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 the central subject of the book: ‘Abd al-Malik Nuri (1921-1998), Gha’ib Tu‘ma Farman (1927-1990), Mahdi Isa al-Saqr (1927-2006) and Fu’ad al-Takarli (1927-2008), all of whom began to write in or around the pivotal decade of the 1950s. It is in these writers’ works that Iraqi fiction came of age and reached artistic maturity. The best of these writers’ works are among the most complex portrayals of the particularities of life in Iraq and the human condition in general to come out of the Arab world.
Wen-chin Ouyang
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780748655694
- eISBN:
- 9780748684298
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748655694.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
Mad love in the Arabic novel is an expression of the anxiety surrounding Arabic novel's search for form. It is symptomatic of nostalgia for the future that, in the absence of a viable trajectory in ...
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Mad love in the Arabic novel is an expression of the anxiety surrounding Arabic novel's search for form. It is symptomatic of nostalgia for the future that, in the absence of a viable trajectory in the Arab world's disappointment in the nation-state and modernisation, retreats into the past, arguing with it and looking in it for a resolution for the love triangle it creates for nation-state, modernity and tradition. This book uncovers the politics of nostalgia inherent in the Arabic novel, places these in the context of the birth of the Arabic novel in the intercultural networks of exchange between East and West, past and present, and traces them to the discourses on aesthetics, ethics and politics relevant to cultural and literary transformations of the Arabic speaking world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Nostalgia and madness are the tropes through which the Arabic novel writes its own history as a story of grappling with and resisting the hegemony of both the state and tradition.Less
Mad love in the Arabic novel is an expression of the anxiety surrounding Arabic novel's search for form. It is symptomatic of nostalgia for the future that, in the absence of a viable trajectory in the Arab world's disappointment in the nation-state and modernisation, retreats into the past, arguing with it and looking in it for a resolution for the love triangle it creates for nation-state, modernity and tradition. This book uncovers the politics of nostalgia inherent in the Arabic novel, places these in the context of the birth of the Arabic novel in the intercultural networks of exchange between East and West, past and present, and traces them to the discourses on aesthetics, ethics and politics relevant to cultural and literary transformations of the Arabic speaking world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Nostalgia and madness are the tropes through which the Arabic novel writes its own history as a story of grappling with and resisting the hegemony of both the state and tradition.
