Introduction: Egyptian Blogs between Fiction and Autobiography

This chapter presents the main topic of the study and the theoretical and methodological framework used in the book. First, it argues that, so far, the debate concerning blogs has tended to consider them as forms of diary, i.e. non-fiction while few scholars have looked at blogs as a new literary genre. In the Arab world, blogs have mainly been studied as tools for political activism, while some attention has been given to blogs turned into books. Therefore, the theory of ‘autofiction’ is introduced as a possible interpretative framework to understand the literary features of some blogs. Focusing on Arabic literature, the chapter shows that that although the term ‘autofiction’ was coined in France in 1970s, the practice of fictionalizing the self has a long tradition in Arabic literature. Finally, since Internet literature is a relatively new field of research, the chapter briefly illustrates the methodology and challenges adopted in this study, and in particular: the selection of primary sources; the benefits of combining close reading with interviews, and the researcher’s ethical stances concerning Internet material and interviews in time of a popular revolution and military censorship.