The city in modern Arabic literature

1986 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 193-202 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. C. Ostle
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Limited Range ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
Implicit Contract ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
Traditional Societies ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Arabic ◽  
The City

A superficial consideration of the history of Arabic literature impresses one by the remarkable longevity of literary forms: a qaṣīda written by the pre-Islamic poet Imru'l-Qays and many of those written by Aḥmad Shawqī who died in 1932 are eminently recognizable members of the same species. The system of prosody as codified by Khalīl b. Ahmad (d. A.D. 791) was still very much in force, and the thematic divisions into nasīb, wasf, and madīḥ or hijā' still had much in common. Similarly the maqāma form with its or ornate rhyming prose and limited range of stock characters was still being produced in Arabic at the turn of this century, and the links with the works of al-Hamadhānī (d. A.D. 1008) and al-Harīrī (d. A.D. 1122) are plain to behold and to hear. As with much world literature which is the product of ‘conservative’ or ‘traditional’ societies (for want of better terms), style is all. In thematic terms there is an implicit contract of understanding between the writer and the small, rarefied, élitist public. They know what to expect and the writer or performer delivers. The language, both in its form and its content, is a vehicle through which the relationships between writer or performer, and public or audience, are expressed.

Stranger Fictions

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca C. Johnson
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Global Circulation ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Arabic

Zaynab, first published in 1913, is widely cited as the first Arabic novel, yet the previous eight decades saw hundreds of novels translated into Arabic from English and French. This vast literary corpus influenced generations of Arab writers but has, until now, been considered a curious footnote in the genre's history. Incorporating these works into the history of the Arabic novel, this book offers a transformative new account of modern Arabic literature, world literature, and the novel. This book rewrites the history of the global circulation of the novel by moving Arabic literature from the margins of comparative literature to its center. Considering the wide range of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century translation practices, the book argues that Arabic translators did far more than copy European works; they authored new versions of them, producing sophisticated theorizations of the genre. These translations and the reading practices they precipitated form the conceptual and practical foundations of Arab literary modernity, necessitating an overhaul of our notions of translation, cultural exchange, and the global. The book shows how translators theorized the Arab world not as Europe's periphery but as an alternative center in a globalized network. It affirms the central place of (mis)translation in both the history of the novel in Arabic and the novel as a transnational form itself.

Introduction

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Allan
Keyword(s):  
Education Reform ◽  
World Literature ◽  
The Other ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
Religious Institutions ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literary Publics ◽  
The One ◽  
Modern Arabic

This book raises a number of questions concerning the assumed universalism of world literature by analyzing the interwoven strands of modernization, literature, and secularism. It examines the putative opposition between a practice of reading based on memorization, embodiment, and recitation in Qur'anic schools and another practice based on reflection, critique, and judgment, increasingly integral to what gets defined as literacy in the modern Egyptian state. By taking colonial Egypt as a paradigmatic site from which to consider literary publics, textual cultures, and the history of reading, the book reveals two convergent and enmeshed narratives: on the one hand, the formation of a modern literary paradigm linked to education reform, the rise of a reading public and modern Arabic literature, and on the other hand, the story of what gets blotted out, religious institutions and practices that come to be understood as traditional.

A Thousand and One Nights and the Novel

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard van Leeuwen
Keyword(s):  
Magical Realism ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Freedom Of Expression ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The West ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
Modern Arabic

This chapter examines the influence of Alf layla wa layla (A Thousand and One Nights), the ingenious Arabic cycle of stories, on the development of the novel as a literary genre. It shows that the Nights helped shape the European novel in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The chapter first explains how the French translation of the Nights and its popularity in Europe led to its incorporation in world literature, creating an enduring taste for “Orientalism” in many forms. It then considers how the Nights became integrated in modern Arabic literature and how Arabic novels inspired by it were used to criticize social conditions, dictatorial authority, and the lack of freedom of expression. It also discusses the Nights as a source of innovation for the trend of magical realism, as well as its role in the interaction between the Arab world and the West.

Muhammad Mustafa Badawi in Conversation

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abdul-Nabi Isstaif
Keyword(s):  
Early Life ◽  
World Literature ◽  
English Language ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
Literature And Politics ◽  
The Family ◽  
Essential Questions ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City

This chapter presents a 1997 interview with Mustafa Badawi and includes sections relating to his early life and education until 1947 when he was sent to England to pursue further studies in English. Badawi first talks about the years of his early formation in the family, the neighbourhood and his various schools in Alexandria before discussing his cultural formation in the city. He reveals that he decided to specialise in English language in order to deepen his study of English literature so that he could see Arabic literature in the wider context of world literature. Badawi also describes his attitudes towards literature and criticism, which he says involved three essential questions: the relationship between literature and politics; the relationship between literature and morality; and the nature of language and its function in poetry, and consequently the relationship between poetry and science, or between poetry and thought or knowledge in general.

A New History of Modern Arabic Literature

1973 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 157-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
JACOB M. Landau
Keyword(s):  
Arabic Literature ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Arabic

scholarly journals Literature and Revolution

2011 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 385-386 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samah Selim
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Tidal Wave ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
Class Discussion ◽  
Dead Weight ◽  
Revolutionary Politics ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Modern Arabic

The three-week uprising in Egypt that ended with the removal of Husni Mubarak on February 11 happened to coincide with the section of my spring course syllabus on the Egyptian novel from Najib Mahfuz to Ahmed Alaidy. As was the case for many of my colleagues and their students, the rapid and awe-inspiring events unfolding daily before us pushed purely academic concerns to the margins of class discussion. This tidal wave of revolutionary politics erupting into the classroom forced me to the realization that my larger syllabus was not simply some neutral or systematic survey of half a century's worth of Arabic literature. I began to think about the largely invisible dystopic intellectual and historical paradigms through which modern Arabic literature is often framed, at least in the United States. The nahḍa/naksa narrative, which compelled many of us to read Arab cultural history of the 20th century as a story of brief “awakening” followed by irredeemable decline and corruption, is clearly no longer tenable in the wake of February 11. This same narrative underpinned the highly self-conscious postmodernism that began to emerge in Egypt in the 1990s and that reached its apogee a couple of decades later at the end of the 2000s, a postmodernism that was celebrated (though by no means universally) as the true beginning of literary modernity and the emancipation of the subject from the dead weight of a past ideological age.

An Introduction to the History of Modern Arabic Literature in Egypt

1989 ◽  
Vol 29 (1/4) ◽  
pp. 147
Author(s):  
Rotraud Wielandt ◽  
J. Brugman
Keyword(s):  
Arabic Literature ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Arabic

A Short History of Modern Arabic Literature

1994 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 202
Author(s):  
Issa Peters ◽  
M. M. Badawi
Keyword(s):  
Arabic Literature ◽  
Short History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Arabic

Modern Egyptian renaissance man

1994 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 184-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin Ostle
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Dual Process ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Classical Poetry ◽  
History Of ◽  
Great Tradition ◽  
Renaissance Man ◽  
Modern Arabic ◽  
Classical Arabic

The rise of political consciousness in the Arab Provinces of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century has long been referred to as an era of rebirth or resurrection (nahḍa), and from its earliest stages this period saw a dual process of aspirations to political emancipation and creative waves of cultural regeneration. Thus George Antonius was moved to attribute the beginnings of the Arab national movement to the foundation of a modest literary society in Beirut in 1847; the two figures who dominated the intellectual life of Syria in the mid nineteenth century—Nāṣīf al-Yāzijī and Buṭrus al-Bustānī—were ded icated to the resurrection of the lost world of classical Arabic literature, to the virtual re-creation of Arabic as one of the languages of the modern world, and to preaching the virtues of education based on inter-confessional tolerance and patriotic ideals. The most distinguished area of the early history of modern Arabic literature is neo-classical poetry, whose revival of the achievements of the golden age of the ‘Abbāsids provided the foundation on which the first tentative steps towards the renewal of the great tradition were to be based. Indeed the technical excellence of the neo-classical mode was such that it dominated poetry in Egypt at least until the late 1920s, and for even longer in Iraq and the rest of the Levant.

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