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This book will present close readings of three contemporary Arabic novelists - an Egyptian (Gamal Al-Ghitany), an Algerian (Taher Ouettar) and a Touareg Libyan (Ibrahim Al-Koni) - who have all turned to Sufism as a literary strategy aimed at negotiating i
Essays in this volume examine the effects of leaving one's native culture or experiencing the imposition of a colonising culture.
Edward Said continues to fascinate and stir controversy, nowhere more than with his classic work Orientalism. Debating Orientalism brings a rare mix of perspectives to an ongoing polemic. Contributors from a range of disciplines take stock of the book's impact and appraise its significance in contemporary cultural politics and philosophy.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, modernist writers developed new techniques for depicting characters' thoughts, feelings, and desires that revolutionized the novel form—a revolution novelists and critics are still reckoning with today. Troubling Late Modernism tracks how those techniques have been perversely reinvented by some of the most influential and innovative writers of the postwar period. Chapters on Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel Beckett, Toni Morrison, John Banville, J. M. Coetzee, and Eimear McBride reveal how these writers at once exploit and extend modernist forms of narration to cultivate disquieting affective attachments to protagonists compelled by violent or ...
This book examines how contemporary global novels by Salman Rushdie, David Mitchell, Rana Dasgupta and Rachel Kushner have evolved new aesthetics to represent global economic and ecological crises. Paying close attention to the interrelations between postcolonial, world, and global literatures, this book argues that postcolonial literary studies cannot account for global crises that exceed the national and anti-colonial. Advocating an interdisciplinary framework informed by a synthesis of materialist literary theory with world-systems theory, combining Fredric Jameson and Georg Lukács with Giovanni Arrighi and Jason W. Moore, this book examines how global literatures metabolise not only socioeconomic conditions, but also transformations in the world-ecology, and emergent developmental and epochal crises of capitalism.
The nahda or Arab renaissance of the 19th and early 20th centuries forms the basis of modernity in Arabic literature and Arab thought more generally. This book enhances our understanding of the movement that led its culture from medievalism to modern time
Are we free agents? This perennial question is addressed by tragedy when it dramatizes the struggle of individuals with supernatural forces, or maps the inner conflict of a mind divided against itself. The first part of this book follows the adaptations of four myths as they migrate from classical Greek tragedy to Seneca and on to seventeenth-century France: the stories of Agamemnon, Oedipus, Medea, and Phaedra. Detailed linguistic analysis charts the playwrights’ contrasting assumptions about agency and autonomy. In the second part, six plays by Corneille and Racine are discussed to show how the problem of agency and free will is explored in scenarios which show protagonists who are in thrall to their past, to their rulers, or to their own ideals.
Cultural Memory, a subtle and comprehensive process of identity formation, promotion and transmission, is considered as a set of symbolic practices and protocols, with particular emphasis on repositories of memory and the institutionalized forms in which they are embodied. High and low culture as texts embedded in the texture of memory, as well as material culture as a communal receptacle and reservoir of memory are analysed in their historical contingency. Symbolic representations of accepted and counter history/ies, and the cultural nodes and mechanisms of the cultural imaginary are also issues of central interest. Twenty-six contributions tackle these topics from a theoretical and histori...
Drawing together the insights of postcolonial scholarship and cultural studies, Popular Postcolonialisms questions the place of ‘the popular’ in the postcolonial paradigm. Multidisciplinary in focus, this collection explores the extent to which popular forms are infused with colonial logics, and whether they can be employed by those advocating for change. It considers a range of fiction, film, and non-hegemonic cultural forms, engaging with topics such as environmental change, language activism, and cultural imperialism alongside analysis of figures like Tarzan and Frankenstein. Building on the work of cultural theorists, it asks whether the popular is actually where elite conceptions of...
This book presents an intellectual history of today’s Muslim world, surveying contemporary Muslim thinking in its various manifestations, addressing a variety of themes that impact on the lives of present-day Muslims. Focusing on the period from roughly the late 1960s to the first decade of the twenty-first century, the book is global in its approach and offers an overview of different strands of thought and trends in the development of new ideas, distinguishing between traditional, reactionary, and progressive approaches. It presents a variety of themes and issues including: The continuing relevance of the legacy of traditional Islamic learning as well as the use of reason; the centrality...