Arab Nationalism, Decolonization and the Making of a Transregional Literature

Erscheinungsjahr 2025
ISBN: 978-1-009-57529-4
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, 280 Seiten

Reihe: Cambridge Studies in World Literature

What makes Arabic literature, Arabic? Casting critical new light on area-based approaches, this comparative study tracks the diverse literary practices in Arabic and French that, during and after decolonization, writers on both sides of North Africa and the Middle East used to found a transregional literary system. Influenced by anti-colonial Arab nationalism, they mapped this literary system's imaginative and circulational scale according to the experience that they believed decolonial literature must represent and amplify: a shared political experience they called “Arab.” As it develops the first account of transregional scale between Morocco and Iraq, and between national and world literatures, this study shows that a major expression of twentieth-century Arabic literature produced itself as a set of print culture practices, literary themes, and interpretive norms in response to evolving ideas of Arab experience and emancipation.

Autoren/Hrsg.

McManus, Anne-Marie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction; Part I. The Mashreq Imagines Algeria: 1. Algeria's war, al-Adab and a new transregional literature from the Mashreq; 2. Arabics of everyday life; 3. Authority, polysemy, emancipation; Part II. The Maghreb Writes East: 4. Souffles-Anfas between national and transregional scales; 5. Totality and the second nahda (Renaissance); 6. Arab nationalism without Arab nationalists; Part III. Circles of Interpretation: The Arabic Novel After the Algerian War: 7. The celestial orbit: Arab repetition; 8. The bracelet: true signs of the mother-nation; 9. The circle: beyond the transregional Arabic novel; Conclusion.

Über Autor(innen)

McManus, Anne-Marie
Anne-Marie McManus is a comparative literary scholar of Arabic, French, and English. Her research has been funded by the European Research Council, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Mellon Foundation, and NYU Abu Dhabi. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Yale University.