Book dossier

The novel and the rural imaginary in Egypt, 1880-1985

by Samah Selim

"This book places the field of modern Arabic literature studies in the context of contemporary debates in the humanities about the relationship between narrative, history and ideology. In this sense, it addresses pressing issues raised by literary theory, literary history and postcolonial studies, and grounds these broader discussions in a study of a particular narrative genre - the novel - as it has been constructed and produced over a century in a local/global context. The book locates questions of languages, genre, textuality and canonicity within a historical and theoretical framework that foregrounds the emergence of modern nationalism in Egypt. The ways in which the cultural discourses produced by twentieth-century Egyptian nationalism created a space for both a hegemonic and counter-hegemonic politics of language, class and place that inscribed bifurcated narrative and social geography are examined. The book argues that the rupture between the village and the city contained in the Egyptian nationalism discourse is reproduced as a narrative dislocation that has continued to characterize and shape the Egyptian novel in general and the village novel in particular. Reading the village novel in Egypt as a dynamic intertext that constructs modernity in a local historical and political context, rather than rehearsing a simple repetition of dominant European literary-critical paradigms, this book offers a new approach to the construction of modern Arabic literary history, as well as to theoretical questions related to the structure and role of the novel as a worldly narrative genre."--BOOK JACKET.