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This book assesses the contribution of women to the Arabic novel, both in subject matter and form. It begins by tracing the struggle over women's rights in the Arab world, particularly the gradual improvement in women's access to education--the first area in which women made significant gains. Subsequent chapters discuss Arab women writers' remarkable talents and determination to overcome the barriers of a male-dominated culture; survey the 1950s and 1960s, during which women's writing gained momentum and more women writers emerged; and address the shift in emphasis and attitude that women's literature underwent in the late 1960s, especially following the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, when women no...
This study explores the mother-daughter relationship as the most fundamental and most intimate female relationship. It draws on both early and contemporary writings of Arab women to illuminate the traditional and evolving nature of mother-daughter relationships in Arab families and how these family dynamics reflect and influence modern Arab life.
Traces the development of the modern Arabic novel from the 1960s to the present.
Emerging in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a secular activity, Persian literature acquired its own modernity by redefining past aesthetic practices of identity and history. By analyzing selected work of major pre- and post-revolutionary literary figures, Talattof shows how Persian literary history has not been an integrated continuum but a series of distinct episodic movements shaped by shifting ideologies. Drawing on western concepts, modern Persian literature has responded to changing social and political conditions through complex strategies of metaphorical and allegorical representations that both construct and denounce cultural continuities. The book provides a unique contribution in that it draws on texts that demonstrate close affinity to such diverse ideologies as modernism, Marxism, feminism, and Islam. Each ideological standard has influenced the form, characterization, and figurative language of literary texts as well as setting the criteria for literary criticism and determining which issues are to be the focus of literary journals.
The first study in English to chart the development of the Palestinian novel in exile and under occupation from 1948 onwards.
Entries profile women writers of poetry, fiction, prose, and drama, including Sylvia Plath, Fleur Adcock, and Toni Morrison.
This book investigates various forms of women s resistance to male domination, as represented in Kuwaiti women s fiction. Drawing on Marxist-feminist literary theory, it closely analyses selected texts (published between 1953 and 2000), which reflect the effects of patriarchal culture and tradition on race, class, and gender relations in Kuwait and the Arabian Gulf region in general. It argues that the selected texts portray the pre-oil generations of Kuwaiti/Arabian Gulf women born before or in the first half of the twentieth century as resistant and/or revolutionary figures, contrary to the common notion of their stereotypical passivity and submissiveness. This book demonstrates how Kuwaiti women writers have used literature to work for, and contribute to, social change.
In 1910, when Khedive Abbas II married a second wife surreptitiously, the contrast with his openly polygamous grandfather, Ismail, whose multiple wives and concubines signified his grandeur and masculinity, could not have been greater. That contrast reflected the spread of new ideals of family life that accompanied the development of Egypt’s modern marriage system. Modernizing Marriage explores the evolution of marriage and marital relations, shedding new light on the social and cultural history of Egypt. Family is central to modern Egyptian history and in the ruling court did the “political work.” Indeed, the modern state began as a household government in which members of the ruler...
Studies of Palestinian society, economy, and politics are appearing with increasing frequency, but works in English about Palestinian literature, particularly that written in Israel, are still scarce. This book looks at this literature within the political and social context of Palestinian society, with a special focus on literature written during the Intifada "uprising" period (1987-93).