Ebook: Politics of Nostalgia in the Arabic Novel: Nation-State, Modernity and Tradition

Uncovers the politics of nostalgia and madness inherent in the Arabic novel

The Arabic novel has taken shape in the intercultural networks of exchange between East and West, past and present. Wen-chin Ouyang shows how this has created a politics of nostalgia which can be traced to discourses on aesthetics, ethics and politics relevant to cultural and literary transformations of the Arabic speaking world in the 19th and 20th centuries. She reveals nostalgia and madness as the tropes through which the Arabic novel writes its own story of grappling with and resisting the hegemony of both the state and cultural heritage.

• Explores the work of novelists including Naguib Mahfouz, 'Abd al-Khaliq al-Rikabi, Jamal al-Ghitani, Ben Salem Himmich, Ali Mubarak, Adonis, Mahmoud Darwish and Nizar Qabbani
• Shows madness to be an expression of the anxiety surrounding the Arabic novel's search for form, and Arab intellectuals' disappointment in the nation-state and modernisation

Shortlisted for the Sheikh Zayed Book Award 2014