Arab Culture and the Novel Genre, Identity and Agency in Egyptian Fiction

Arab Culture and the Novel explores the status and role of the novel in modern Arab culture. It postulates the historical experience of modern Egypt as largely representative of the general condition of other Arab, Islamic, and postcolonial nation states, especially as these wrestle with the perennial quest for a viable sense of personal and collective identity in modernity. One of the book's major thesis is that certain generic properties of the novel, such as its constitutive interest in the individual as an autonomous agent of moral, ethical, political, and sexual choices and desires appear incompatible with entrenched beliefs and norms of traditional Arab society and culture. How the Egyptian novel reconciles this proactive, discursive agency with the aesthetic imperatives of the literary genre is a major concern of this study. The book tackles such broad questions through sustained textual analysis and close reading of a significant number of Egyptian novels. It thus consciously situates the literary text at the heart of the critical performance. Ultimately, the will of the Arabic novel is to imagine the unthinkable and to reinstate in the Arab public debate topics long banished from there, such as the body, sexuality, religious difference, and political dissent may bespeak the absence of a viable Arab civil society and a crippling cultural impasse. This study will be of interest to students and researchers alike of Middle East Studies, Literature and History. Muhammad Siddiq is Associate Professor at the Department for Near Eastern Studies, University of California, Berkeley, USA.Siddiq, Muhammad is the author of 'Arab Culture and the Novel Genre, Identity and Agency in Egyptian Fiction', published 2007 under ISBN 9780415772600 and ISBN 0415772605.