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Neoliberal contradictions, necrocapitalist nightmares: questions of human agency and free will in Aḥmad Saʿdāwī’s Frankenstein in Baghdad Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2024-03-01 Jamil Khader
This article argues that the major fantastic conceit, the Whatsitname (the shisma), in Ahmad Sa'dāwī's novel, Frankenstein in Baghdad, functions as an allegory for the repressed totality of necroca...
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Mapping exile: post-Arab Spring revolutionaries’ diasporic voices in Serag Mounir’s Diaspora Spring Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2024-02-19 Khaled Mostafa Karam, Hamdy Ebeid Khalil, Mahmoud El Bagoury
Serag Mounir’s Diaspora Spring (Rabīʿ al-shatāt, 2019) scrutinizes the critical effects of the Arab Spring on Arab youth, offering a multilayered portrayal of the present Middle East and its revolu...
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On the animating affect of ṭarab and its (un)translatability Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2024-02-09 Dina A. Mahmoud
This article explores the (un)translatability of ṭarab—typically understood as feeling ecstasy in response to poetic and musical performances—in the recitation of Arabic poems and their translation...
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Subjectivity, agency, and the question of gender in Fadwa Tuqan’s post-naksa poetry Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2024-02-05 Linda Istanbulli
After the naksa, Palestinian poet Fadwa Tuqan composed her famous “I Shall Not Weep,” which she later included in her first resistance-themed collection: The Night and Knights. In this poem, Tuqan ...
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“In the dead of night, a cry” by Ata Nahai Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2024-01-17
Published in Middle Eastern Literatures (Ahead of Print, 2024)
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Counter creaturely communities in Emily Nasrallah’s Yawmīyyāt Hirr and Hoda Barakat’s Barīd al-Layl Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2023-12-13 Yasmine Khayyat
This article examines the possibilities as well as the limits of creaturely solidarity in Lebanese novelist Emily Nasrallah's (d. 2018) young adult novel Yawmīyyāt Hirr (A Cat's Diary), first publi...
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War remains: ruination and resistance in Lebanon Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2023-09-27 Ghenwa Hayek
Published in Middle Eastern Literatures (Ahead of Print, 2023)
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Exhausting aesthetic critiques of the authoritarian present in Egyptian literature from Ṣunʿallāh Ibrāhīm to Muḥammad Rabīʿ Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2023-09-13 Brady Patrick Ryan
ABSTRACT In this article, I outline a trajectory of aesthetic critique of the authoritarian present in Egypt from Ṣunʿallāh Ibrāhīm’s novellas Tilka al-rāʾiḥa and 67 to Muḥammad Rabīʿ’s ʿUṭārid, from the disappointments and defeats of the Nasser era to the despair of the postrevolutionary present. This trajectory of critique emerges from progressive time’s collapse upon the present and is rooted in
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Climate change and the future of the city: Arabic science fiction as climate fiction in Egypt and Iraq Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2023-09-11 Teresa Pepe
ABSTRACT This article analyses the representation of the climate crisis and urban imaginaries in post-2011 Arabic science fiction (SF), arguing that Arabic SF, and its cross-genre of critical dystopian fiction, intersects with global climate fiction (cli-fi), while maintaining a horizon for hope. It compares two graphic novels written by authors of Egyptian origins, Aḥmad Nājī's Istikhdām al-Ḥayāt
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In search of the “voice of the people”: Mahmoud Darwish’s third-worldist genres Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2023-09-11 Maru Pabón
In the years following the Bandung Conference of 1955, poetry that captured the “voice of the people” became a strategy of the project of Third-Worldism. Mahmoud Darwish (b. 1941, Birwah, d. 2008, ...
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Hackneyed phrases: lingual migrations in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2023-09-11 Adnan Mahmutović
Tayeb Salih’s world-literary classic Mawsim al-hijra ilā al-shimāl (1966) has served World Literature as the preeminent text of postcolonialism, touching on issues of identity, nationality, culture...
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What do Keloğlan stories say about masculine anxieties and reclaiming masculinity? Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2023-09-11 Seda Demiralp
Keloğlan stories deliver an anti-patriarchal message. The stories interpreted in this article narrate the male ego’s journey of individuation through an engagement with repressed psychic content, p...
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Reorienting modernism in Arabic and Persian poetry Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2023-09-07 Marlé Hammond
Published in Middle Eastern Literatures (Vol. 25, No. 2-3, 2022)
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Between literature and history: receptions of poetry in ancient Egypt Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2023-08-16 Margaret Geoga
This article explores literary reception in ancient Egypt, focusing on the enigmatic poem The Teaching of Amenemhat, ca. 1550–500 BCE. Combining material philology, textual criticism, and reception...
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Culture outside of the state: aesthetics and education in the works of Salama Musa, Taha Husayn, and Ramsis Yunan Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2023-08-04 Maya Kesrouany
This article analyses Egyptian definitions of thaqāfa or “culture” from 1922 to 1954 by focusing on three intellectuals: Salama Musa (1887–1958), Taha Husayn (1889–1973), and Ramsis Yunan (1913–196...
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Lebanon in the Devil’s Waters: the literary supernatural in Ghada al-Samman’s civil war trilogy Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2023-08-03 Renée Ragin Randall
In the early 1970s, Syrian-born author, Ghada al-Samman authored two essays on the supernatural based, in part, on her experiences in Beirut. These essays mark the beginning of what I identify as h...
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Iridescent Kuwait: Petro-Modernity and Urban Visual Culture in the Mid-Twentieth Century Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2023-07-17 Kylie Walters
Published in Middle Eastern Literatures (Ahead of Print, 2023)
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Once upon a time in the anthropocene: myths, legends, and futurity in Turkish climate fiction Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2023-06-19 Merve Tabur
ABSTRACT Myths and legends in climate fiction are often studied with reference to fantasy and magical realism; yet the relationship between the two forms remains understudied. This article examines the use of both as they overlap in Turkish climate fiction to address the multiscalar complexities of climate change and to offer imaginaries of multispecies solidarity. Through close readings of Ayşegül
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Garbage, corruption, and political protest in Lebanese literature and film Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2023-05-02 Maya Aghasi
ABSTRACT This article explores the representation of garbage in Lebanese literature and film, focusing on the children’s book, Picture Perfect (2021), by Najla El Khatib (b. 1987) and two films by director Mounia Akl (b. 1989): Submarine (al-Ghawwāṣa, 2016) and Costa Brava, Lebanon (Kūstā brāfā, 2021). Each reframes socio-political crisis, including the 2015 garbage crisis, the 2020 Beirut port explosion
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“Was he Ramzi?” A short story by Samira Azzam Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2023-04-26 Ranya Abdelrahman (Introduction), Ferial B. Khalifa (Translation)
Published in Middle Eastern Literatures (Vol. 25, No. 1, 2022)
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A Dove in Free Flight Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2023-04-14 Alexa Firat
Published in Middle Eastern Literatures (Vol. 25, No. 2-3, 2022)
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The problem with hybridity: a critique of Armeno-Turkish studies Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2023-04-11 Aram Ghoogasian
ABSTRACT The study of Armeno-Turkish Literature, or Turkish written in Armenian script, has boomed of late, posing a challenge to Turkish literary historiography's neglect of Armeno-Turkish texts. Though this scholarship has argued against the exclusion of Armenians from late Ottoman cultural history, it has also unintentionally reproduced the nationalist, exclusionary logic that such segregation rested
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Palestine’s YA fiction and identity in Ahlam Bsharat’s Code Name: Butterfly Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2023-02-22 Aida Fahmawi Watad
ABSTRACT The article addresses a relatively neglected area of research: Palestinian literature for adolescents, adab al-yāfiʿīn [literature for adolescents] or Young Adult (YA) literature. It sheds light on how this literature addresses the unique problematics of growing up under occupation and considers how novels for young adults reflect the Palestinian teenager's consolidation of his or her identity
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Threading the racial capitalocene: on the poetics of affective porosity in Ibrahim al-Koni's Bleeding of the Stone (Nazīf al-ḥajar) and Yoel Hoffmann's Book of Joseph (Sefer Yosef) Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2023-02-21 Rachel Green
ABSTRACT Excavating traces of the Racial Capitalocene in Libyan-Tuareg author Ibrahim al-Koni's Arabic language Bleeding of the Stone (1990) and Israeli Jewish author Yoel Hoffmann's Hebrew-language Book of Joseph (1988), this article posits a novel critical framework for comparative readings of Middle Eastern literatures. In centering the advance of the racializing commodity frontier as primary node
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Dream interpretation and parodies of translation in Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq’s al-Sāq ʿalā al-sāq Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2023-02-16 Phoebe Bay Carter
ABSTRACT In Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq’s 1855 semiautobiographical picaresque al-Sāq ʿalā al-sāq (Leg Over Leg), the author’s double, the Fāriyāq, holds a series of jobs that parodically stand in for al-Shidyāq’s own employments. This article addresses the Fāriyāq’s career as an oneiromancer, reading it as an allegory of al-Shidyāq’s work as a Bible translator for European Protestant missionaries. By representing
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In memoriam: Franklin Lewis (1961-2022) Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2023-01-24
Published in Middle Eastern Literatures (Vol. 24, No. 3, 2021)
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Kamāl al-Dīn Banāʾī’s Bahrām va Bihrūz: A Persian romance qua mirror for princes in light of Aq Qoyunlu history Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2023-01-12 Chad G. Lingwood
ABSTRACT This article proposes that Bāgh-i iram, a Persian masnavī by Kamāl al-Dīn Shīr-ʿAlī Banāʾī, the narrative of which presents a love triangle involving brother-dynasts—hence its alternative title, Bahrām va Bihrūz—is a work of moral and ethical advice. The study posits that Banāʾī composed Bahrām va Bihrūz, which survives only in manuscript form, to honor his deceased patron, Yaʿqūb b. Ūzūn
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Experimentation and the absurd in two plays by Syrian playwright Walīd Ikhlāṣī Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2023-01-11 Basilius Bawardi, Reem Ghanayem
ABSTRACT Walīd Ikhlāṣī (1935–2022) is a modernist Syrian playwright who was part of a broader Arab movement experimenting with the theatre of the absurd. His experimental writings are based on a fundamental refusal to accept ready-made values – literary, cultural, or philosophical. In this experimentation he developed a truly unique style, set apart from his contemporaries. Examining two one-act plays:
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“Pantomime”: A short story by Sami Paşazade Sezai Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2022-12-14 Translated by Ici Vanwesenbeeck
Published in Middle Eastern Literatures (Vol. 24, No. 3, 2021)
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Modern nihilism and Naguib Mahfouz’s faith in liberalism Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2022-12-01 Ken Seigneurie
ABSTRACT By mid-twentieth century, liberal thought was in crisis. Its victory over fascism ill concealed the empty promise at the heart of liberalism, that freedom defined as an absence of compulsion could substitute for a sense of human purpose. Non-western writers saw this as clearly as Camus, Arendt, Niebuhr, and Marcuse did. This essay regards Naguib Mahfouz’s 1965 novel, The Beggar, as a bid to
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Revolutions aesthetic: a cultural history of Ba'thist Syria Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2022-11-07 Molly Courtney
Published in Middle Eastern Literatures (Vol. 25, No. 1, 2022)
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The translator of desires Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2022-11-04 Kevin Blankinship
Published in Middle Eastern Literatures (Vol. 24, No. 3, 2021)
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The Tent Generation: Palestinian Poems Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2022-10-25 Tayseer Abu Odeh
Published in Middle Eastern Literatures (Vol. 24, No. 3, 2021)
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Richard van Leeuwen. The Thousand and One Nights and Twentieth-Century Fiction: Intertextual Readings; and Muhsin J. al-Musawi. The Arabian Nights in Contemporary World Cultures Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2022-10-18 Wen-chin Ouyang
Published in Middle Eastern Literatures (Vol. 25, No. 1, 2022)
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Arabic exile literature in Europe. Defamiliarising forced migration Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2022-09-23 Annamaria Bianco
Published in Middle Eastern Literatures (Vol. 24, No. 3, 2021)
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Is the Arab nahḍah really Arabic? Literary translingualisms in the nahḍah's contact zones Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2022-09-13 Alaaeldin Mahmoud
ABSTRACT Against the perception of the nahḍah’s literati in Egypt and the Arab mashriq as being narrowly monolingual, due to their literary use of fuṣḥā Arabic and the various ʿāmmiyyahs, this article highlights literary translingual practices in the nahḍah’s contact zones in Egypt, Syro-Lebanon, and Iraq. Literary translingualisms took various forms such as bi-or-translingual azjāl (“vernacular verse”)
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Muḥammad al-Māghūṭ’s rhetoric of sincerity: a major voice in modern Arabic poetry Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2022-08-15 Daniel Behar
ABSTRACT This article highlights the poetics of Syrian poet Muḥammad al-Māghūt ̣(1934-2006) as forging a poetic identity enacted as a series of performative contradictions between the empirical and the poetic selves in what amounts to a discourse of “rhetorical sincerity.” This poetic discourse employs a variety of devices to communicate that the irreducibility of Arab life can be contained neither
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Poetry, satire, and self in the post-constitutional Iranian-Jewish periodical Ha-Hayyim Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2022-06-27 Daniel Amir
ABSTRACT The Iranian-Jewish newspaper Ha-Hayyim represented a high point of Jewish engagement with the wider public sphere in the late Qajar period. Its modernizing agenda saw it and its editor Shemuel Hayyim become subjects of controversy as Jews debated their political future in Iran. This article examines four poems featured in Ha-Hayyim as a means of illuminating a period of Jewish literary creativity
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Beyond the land of Palestine: deserts, shores, seas Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2022-06-16 Joseph R. Farag
ABSTRACT How the land of Palestine is imagined goes to the heart of Palestinian identity, making the process a significant and fraught endeavor. However, while the centrality of land to the imagined geography of Palestine has long been acknowledged, less attention has been paid to Palestine’s sea. This paper therefore explores how the canonical Palestinian authors, Ghassan Kanafani and Jabra Ibrahim
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Syrian poetry in exile: the case of Wafai Laila Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2022-05-10 Jonas Elbousty
ABSTRACT The social, economic, ecological, political, and religious hardships have forced many Syrian intellectuals to search for a safe haven. These struggles, both in their country of origin and host lands, have inspired many poets to explore topics documenting their trauma and loss. The majority of cultural production that has been produced since 2011 discusses themes, such as alienation, displacement
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Hafiz and his contemporaries: poetry, performance and patronage in fourteenth-century Iran Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2022-03-25 Domenico Ingenito
Published in Middle Eastern Literatures (Vol. 24, No. 2, 2021)
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Beholding beauty: Saʿdi of Shiraz and the aesthetics of desire in medieval Persian poetry Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2022-03-25 Jonathan Lawrence
Published in Middle Eastern Literatures (Vol. 24, No. 2, 2021)
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Co-editors’ introduction Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2022-03-21 Huda Fakhreddine, Charis Olszok, Nora Parr, Adam Talib
(2021). Co-editors’ introduction. Middle Eastern Literatures: Vol. 24, No. 1, pp. 1-2.
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A Poem by an-Nābighah adh-Dhubyānī Translated by Robin Moger Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2022-03-21
(2021). A Poem by an-Nābighah adh-Dhubyānī Translated by Robin Moger. Middle Eastern Literatures: Vol. 24, No. 1, pp. 60-71.
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In memoriam Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2022-03-21
(2021). In memoriam. Middle Eastern Literatures: Vol. 24, No. 1, pp. 72-77.
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Al-Qaṣīdah al-baṣariyyah fī-l-shiʿir al-ʿarabī al-ḥadīth (The Visual Poem in Modern Arabic Poetry) Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2022-03-15 Dima Nasser
Published in Middle Eastern Literatures (Vol. 24, No. 2, 2021)
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Orphanhood and allegoresis in Raḍwā ʿĀshūr’s Granada Trilogy Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2022-02-08 M.J. Ernst
ABSTRACT Challenging Fredric Jameson’s vision of Third-World literature as national allegory in the shadow of globalization, this article reads Raḍwā ʿĀshūr’s 1990s Thulāthiyyat Gharnāṭah (Granada Trilogy) as a late capitalist allegory of the global South. In the Trilogy, ʿĀshūr places the plight of Castilian Granada’s occupied Arab-Muslim population in dialogue with the experiences of enslaved Andalusians
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Eyes on the prize: the global readability of an IPAF-winning modern Arabic novel Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2022-01-31 Anna Ziajka Stanton
ABSTRACT This article explores the impact of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) on the global circulation and reception of modern Arabic literature through a case study of the 2013 IPAF-winning novel Sāq al-bāmbū by Kuwaiti writer Saʿūd al-Sanʿūsī (b. 1981). It examines how three versions of Sāq al-bāmbū—the original Arabic novel, the English translation, and an abridged Arabic text
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“Milli etmek” [Making national]: masculinity, queerness and disability in Murat Uyurkulak’s Merhume Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2022-01-31 Duygu Oya Ula
ABSTRACT Murat Uyurkulak’s 2016 novel, Merhume, centers stories of queer, disabled and otherwise marginalized characters and embeds them within a real and imagined political history of Turkey. Through the narratives of Alper Kenan, a crime novelist with dwarfism, and Evren Tunga, a butch lesbian literary critic, Uyurkulak lays bare how national and familial belonging is predicated upon ableist, heterosexist
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Reading Iraqi Women’s Novels in English Translation / Return to Ruin: Iraqi Narratives of Exile and Nostalgia Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2021-10-26 Annie Webster
(2021). Reading Iraqi Women’s Novels in English Translation / Return to Ruin: Iraqi Narratives of Exile and Nostalgia. Middle Eastern Literatures: Vol. 24, No. 1, pp. 88-91.
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A Revolution in Rhyme: Poetic Co-option under the Islamic Republic Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2021-08-20 Amir Moosavi
(2021). A Revolution in Rhyme: Poetic Co-option under the Islamic Republic. Middle Eastern Literatures: Vol. 24, No. 1, pp. 85-86.
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English poetry and modern Arabic verse: translation and modernity Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2021-08-20 Qussay Al-Attabi
(2021). English poetry and modern Arabic verse: translation and modernity. Middle Eastern Literatures: Vol. 24, No. 1, pp. 87-88.
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Hydrofictions: water, power and politics in Israeli and Palestinian literature Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2021-07-07 Rachel Green
(2021). Hydrofictions: water, power and politics in Israeli and Palestinian literature. Middle Eastern Literatures: Vol. 24, No. 1, pp. 81-82.
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An iridescent device: premodern Ottoman poetry Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2021-06-15 Murat Umut Inan
(2021). An iridescent device: premodern Ottoman poetry. Middle Eastern Literatures: Vol. 24, No. 1, pp. 83-84.
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Narratives of Older Age: A Review of Samira Aghacy’s Ageing in the Modern Arabic Novel (2020) Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2021-05-17 Sleiman El Hajj
(2021). Narratives of Older Age: A Review of Samira Aghacy’s Ageing in the Modern Arabic Novel (2020) Middle Eastern Literatures: Vol. 24, No. 1, pp. 78-80.
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Sexuality, nationalism and the other: the Arabic literary canon between Orientalism and the Nahḍa discourse at the fin de siècle Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2021-05-10 Feras Alkabani
ABSTRACT This article examines the dual and paradoxical conception of the Arabic literary canon in Orientalist and Nahḍa discourses in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—an era of great change and closer mutual cultural awareness between Europe and the Arab world. What Arabic literature had long signified to European scholars since Antoine Galland’s eighteenth-century translation of The Arabian
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Ethnicity in modern rewritings of Bashshār ibn Burd: “free thinker,” “libertine” or “love poet”? Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2021-05-10 Ahmad Almallah
ABSTRACT Modern scholarship on and translations of Bashshār ibn Burd (d. 784), especially into English, adopt his Persian origin as a method for, or at least as a key, to interpreting and understanding his work. Western rewritings of the poet try to use his Persian origin as a way of disassociating him from his Arabic context. While in the case of modern Arab intellectuals from the 19th century and
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Colonialism, nationalism and modernity in al-Manfalūṭī’s novelization of a Coppée’s play: a comparative reading of Fī sabīl al-tāj and Pour La Couronne Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2021-05-10 Andrea Maria Negri
ABSTRACT This article discusses the ways in which Muṣṭafā Luṭfī al-Manfalūṭī rewrote François Coppée's Pour la Couronne (1895) in the shape of the novel, Fī sabīl al-tāj (1920). Al-Manfalūtī turns a French drama into an Egyptian epic rather than simply introducing a piece of foreign literature by means of translation, so as to spread his call against imperialism and anti-colonialism and his program
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Utopian/Dystopian Lebanon: constructing place in Jabbūr al-Duwayhī’s Sharīd al-manāzil Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2021-05-10 Nadine Sinno
ABSTRACT Sharīd al-manāzil paints a portrait of Beirut at the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War. Born Muslim but raised by a Christian couple in the village of Ḥawra, Niẓām al-ʿAlamī embraces his mixed religious identity and seamlessly navigates Muslim and Christian religious rituals. He moves from Ḥawra to Beirut in search of adventure. When the war erupts, Niẓām is shunned by both Muslims and Christians
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Gender of Trauma in İstanbul İstanbul Middle Eastern Literatures Pub Date : 2021-05-10 Çimen Günay-Erkol
ABSTRACT Burhan Sönmez’s İstanbul İstanbul (2016) is a powerful addition to contemporary prison novels in Turkey. The novel revolves around prisoners who experience systematic torture and are unable to escape the grim destruction that surrounds them. The discussions in the novel around Islamic faith, free will, solitude and captivity produce self-reflexive stories of memory and forgetting, in which