Wen-Chin Ouyang

Poetics of Love in the Arabic Novel (eBook, PDF)

Nation-State, Modernity and Tradition

• Format: PDF

Produktbeschreibung

The Arabic novel has emerged as a major genre in the Arabic literary field since the second half of the twentieth century. Gaber Asfour, a major Egyptian intellectual and critic, has termed the turn of the twenty-first century ''the age of the novel'' in Arab culture. This book tells the story of the Arabic novel''s search for form, taking stock of the ways in which the form and identity politics of this genre engage with aesthetics, ethics and politics in a cross-cultural context and from a transnational perspective.

To date scholarship on the Arabic novel has been preoccupied with postcolonial or nationalist discourses on identity and culture. This book extends our understanding of the genre by moving beyond this approach to consider the Arabic novel within the triangle of the nation-state, modernity and tradition. It shows the ways in which the Arabic novel has taken shape in the intercultural exchanges between East and West, and past and present.

It takes the love story as the central trope through which the Arabic novel tells the tale of its search for form in a world mapped by conflicting ideas. This tale 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 misgivings about its own propriety.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Edinburgh University Press
• Erscheinungstermin: 20. Juni 2012
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780748655052
• Artikelnr.: 38217616

Autorenporträt

Wen-chin Ouyang, FBA is Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at SOAS, University of London. Born in Taiwan and raised in Libya, she completed her BA in Arabic at Tripoli University and PhD in Middle Eastern Studies at Columbia University in New York City. She is the author of Literary Criticism in Medieval Arabic-Islamic Culture: The Making of a Tradition (1997), Poetics of Love in the Arabic Novel (2012) and Politics of Nostalgia in the Arabic Novel (2013). She has also published widely on The Thousand and One Nights, often in comparison with classical and modern Arabic narrative traditions, European and Hollywood cinema, magic realism, and Chinese storytelling. She founded and co-edits Edinburgh Studies in Classical Arabic Literature, and is also Editor-in-Chief of Middle Eastern Literatures. She was a member of the judging panel for Man Booker International Prize for Fiction 2013-15. A native speaker of Arabic and Chinese, she has been working towards Arabic-Chinese comparative literary and cultural studies, including Silk Road Studies.