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This book offers a unique exploration of the work of Paul Bowles and Ibrahim Alkoni, and reveals timely insights into the relationship between the West and the Orient, showing that they both challenge and extend existing scholarship on this subject. It builds on a sound theoretical platform which serves as a solid foundation for the analysis of the overarching theme. Theories of place, representation, Orientalism and post-colonialism are discussed in depth and are linked to the deconstruction and analysis of the selected literary texts, helping the reader understand the various quests and motivations of the protagonists of the works of Bowles and Alkoni. The first part of the book looks into...
This book presents a selection of research papers dealing with the notions of travel and identity in Anglophone literature and culture. Collectively, the chapters ponder such notions as self and other, race, centre and periphery, thus shedding new light on a number of issues that are highly relevant in the context of the ongoing migration crisis. The contributors employ a diverse range of theoretical standpoints – from close reading to deconstruction, from historically informed approaches to linguistic analysis – and thus offer a nuanced panorama of these issues, especially from the nineteenth century onwards.
Since the late 1940s, Arabic poetry has spoken for an Arab conscience, as much as it has debated positions and ideologies, nationally and worldwide. This book tackles issues of modernity and tradition in Arabic poetry as manifested in poetic texts and criticism by poets as participants in transformation and change. It studies the poetic in its complexity, relating to issues of selfhood, individuality, community, religion, ideology, nation, class and gender. Al-Musawi also explores in context issues that have been cursorily noticed or neglected, like Shi’i poetics, Sufism, women’s poetry, and expressions of exilic consciousness. Arabic Poetry employs current literary theory and provides comprehensive coverage of modern and post-modern poetry from the 1950s onwards, making it essential reading for those with interests in Arabic culture and literature and Middle East studies.
Prisons are on the increase from the United States to China, as ever-larger proportions of humanity find themselves behind bars. While prisons now span the world, we know little about their history in global perspective. Rather than interpreting the prison's proliferation as the predictable result of globalization, Cultures of Confinement underlines the fact that the prison was never simply imposed by colonial powers or copied by elites eager to emulate the West, but was reinvented and transformed by a host of local factors, its success being dependent on its very flexibility. Complex cultural negotiations took place in encounters between different parts of the world, and rather than assigning a passive role to Latin America, Asia, and Africa, the authors of this book point out the acts of resistance or appropriation that altered the social practices associated with confinement. The prison, in short, was understood in culturally specific ways and reinvented in a variety of local contexts examined here for the first time in global perspective.
The chapters in this volume cover a broad spectrum of autobiographical material and ranges in time from the 17th century to the present day. They include travelogues as a category of autobiographical writing, as well as a wide variety of the more traditional retrospective prose histories of the self.
The volume contains forty-seven contributions dealing with Islamic thought and history, Arabic literature and linguistics. The variety of perspectives and approaches, and the wide range of subject matters constitute a true mirror of European scholarship in Arabic and Islamic studies. The authors who congregated for the 19th congress of the Union Europeenne des Arabisants et Islamisants at Halle come from many European countries including Middle and Eastern Europe. Philosophy and historiography, Arabic inscriptions and belles-lettres, pre-modern and modern history, Islamic law and theology figure among the topics treated in amply documented studies.
This volume is a collection of studies on the issue of authorship in translation. Leading translation scholars and professional translators discuss the theoretical implications and applicability of the author-translator paradigm. The relationship between translators and authors is addressed in its various manifestations, from the author-translator collaboration, to self-translation, to authorial practices of translating. While offering multiple perspectives, in terms of both theoretical approaches and cultural backgrounds, the volume offers an important and original contribution to the current debate.
It is gradually being acknowledged that the Arabic story-collection Thousand and One Nights has had a major influence on European and world literature. This study analyses the influence of Thousand and One Nights, as an intertextual model, on 20th-century prose from all over the world. Works of approximately forty authors are examined: those who were crucial to the development of the main currents in 20th-century fiction, such as modernism, magical realism and post-modernism. The book contains six thematic sections divided into chapters discussing two or three authors/works, each from a narratological perspective and supplemented by references to the cultural and literary context. It is shown how Thousand and One Nights became deeply rooted in modern world literature especially in phases of renewal and experiment.