The Novel and the Rural Imaginary in Egypt, 1880-1985 (Routledge Studies in Middle Eastern Literatures)

Samah Selim

ISBN 10: 0415595851 / ISBN 13: 9780415595858

Published by Routledge 2010-09-01, 2010

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 6666-IUK-9780415595858

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Novel and the Rural Imaginary in Egypt, 1880-1985 (Routledge Studies in Middle Eastern Literatures)
• Publisher: Routledge 2010-09-01
• Publication Date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0415595851
• ISBN 13: 9780415595858
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

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 a 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.

About the Author

Samah Selim is professor of modern Arabic Literature at Princeton University. Her main research interests are 19th and 20th century fiction in Egypt and the Levant.