Poetics of Love in the Arabic Novel: Nation-State, Modernity and Tradition
Author(s): Dr Wen-chin Ouyang (Author)
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Publication Date: 20 Jun. 2012
Language: English
Print length: 304 pages
ISBN-10: 9780748642731
ISBN-13: 9780748642731
Book Description
Wen-Chin Ouyang explores the development of the Arabic novel, especially the ways in it engages with aesthetics, ethics and politics in a cross-cultural context and from a transnational perspective. Taking love and desire as the central tropes , the story of the Arabic novel is presented as a series of failed, illegitimate love affairs, all tainted by its suspicion of the legitimacy of the nation, modernity and tradition and, above all, by its misgiving about its own propriety. Authors studied include Naguib Mahfouz, Ghassan Kanafani, Ibrahim Nasrallah, Emil Habiby, Jamal al-Ghitani, Ali Mubarak, Muhammad al-Muwaylihi, Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, Khalil Hawi and Salah ‘Abd al-Sabur, and the novels studied include Arabian Nights and Maqamat.
Editorial Reviews
Review
Select Guide Rating
From the Back Cover
AUTHOR APPROVEDTells the story of the Arab novel’s search for formThe novel is now a major genre in the Arabic literary field. This book explores its development, especially the ways in which the genre engages with aesthetics, ethics and politics in a cross-cultural context and from a transnational perspective.It takes love and desire as the central tropes through which the Arabic novel tells the tale of its search for form in a world mapped by conflicting ideas. As it falls in love with the nation-state, the Arabic novel flirts with modernity and lives uncomfortably with tradition. The love triangle it creates is at once an expression of its will to participate in the politics, its interrogation of ethics of storytelling, and its search for new aesthetics.The story of the Arabic novel is presented as a series of failed, illegitimate love affairs, all tainted by its suspicion of the legitimacy of the nation, modernity and tradition, and above all by its misgiving about its own propriety.Wen-chin Ouyang is Reader in Arabic Literature at SOAS. She is author of Literary Criticism in Medieval Arabic Islamic Culture: The Making of a Tradition (Edinburgh University Press, 1997), editor of New Perspectives on the Arabian Nights (Routledge, 2005) and co-editor (with Stephen Hart) of A Companion to Magical Realism (Tamesis, 2005).
About the Author
Wen-chin Ouyang is a Reader in Arabic Literature at the School of Oriental and African Studies. She was born in Taiwan, raised in Libya and educated in the United States. She is the author of ‘Literary Criticism in Medieval Arabic-Islamic Cultur’e (1997) and numerous articles on the Arabic novel, The 1001 Nights and classical Arabic prose writing. She co-edited ‘New Perspectives on the Arabian Nights: Ideological Variations and Narrative Horizons’ (2005), ‘Companion to Magical Realism’ (2005), and ‘The Novelization of Islamic Literatures, Comparative Critical Studies 4: 3’ (2007).
Wow! eBook
