Popular Fiction, Translation and the Nahda in Egypt

Popular Fiction, Translation and the Nahda in Egypt PDF Author: Samah Selim
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 303020362X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
This book is a critical study of the translation and adaptation of popular fiction into Arabic at the turn of the twentieth century. It examines the ways in which the Egyptian nahda discourse with its emphasis on identity, authenticity and renaissance suppressed various forms of cultural and literary creation emerging from the encounter with European genres as well as indigenous popular literary forms and languages. The book explores the multiple and fluid translation practices of this period as a form of ‘unauthorized’ translation that was not invested in upholding nationalist binaries of originality and imitation. Instead, translators experimented with radical and complex forms of adaptation that turned these binaries upside down. Through a series of close readings of novels published in the periodical The People’s Entertainments, the book explores the nineteenth century literary, intellectual, juridical and economic histories that are constituted through translation, and outlines a comparative method of reading that pays particular attention to the circulation of genre across national borders.

Popular Fiction, Translation and the Nahda in Egypt

Popular Fiction, Translation and the Nahda in Egypt PDF Author: Samah Selim
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 303020362X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book is a critical study of the translation and adaptation of popular fiction into Arabic at the turn of the twentieth century. It examines the ways in which the Egyptian nahda discourse with its emphasis on identity, authenticity and renaissance suppressed various forms of cultural and literary creation emerging from the encounter with European genres as well as indigenous popular literary forms and languages. The book explores the multiple and fluid translation practices of this period as a form of ‘unauthorized’ translation that was not invested in upholding nationalist binaries of originality and imitation. Instead, translators experimented with radical and complex forms of adaptation that turned these binaries upside down. Through a series of close readings of novels published in the periodical The People’s Entertainments, the book explores the nineteenth century literary, intellectual, juridical and economic histories that are constituted through translation, and outlines a comparative method of reading that pays particular attention to the circulation of genre across national borders.

The Arab Nahda as Popular Entertainment

The Arab Nahda as Popular Entertainment PDF Author:
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0755647416
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
What was popular entertainment like for everyday Arab societies in Middle Eastern cities during the long nineteenth century? In what ways did café culture, theatre, illustrated periodicals, cinema, cabarets, and festivals serve as key forms of popular entertainment for Arabic-speaking audiences, many of whom were uneducated and striving to contend with modernity's anxiety-inducing realities? Studies on the 19th to mid-20th century's transformative cultural movement known as the Arab nahda (renaissance), have largely focussed on concerns with nationalism, secularism, and language, often told from the perspective of privileged groups. Highlighting overlooked aspects of this movement, this book shifts the focus away from elite circles to quotidian audiences. Its ten contributions range in scope, from music and visual media to theatre and popular fiction. Paying special attention to networks of movement and exchange across Arab societies in Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and Morocco, this book heeds the call for 'translocal/transnational' cultural histories, while contributing to timely global studies on gender, sexuality, and morality. Focusing on the often-marginalized frequenters of cafés, artist studios, cinemas, nightclubs, and the streets, it expands the remit of who participated in the nahda and how they did.

The Oxford Handbook of Modern Egyptian History

The Oxford Handbook of Modern Egyptian History PDF Author: Beth Baron
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190072741
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 601

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Book Description
The essays in this Oxford Handbook rethink the modern history of one of the most important and influential countries in the Middle East--Egypt. For a country and region so often understood in terms of religion and violence, this work explores environmental, medical, legal, cultural, and political histories. It gives readers an excellent view of the current debates in Egyptian history.

Stranger Fictions

Stranger Fictions PDF Author: Rebecca C. Johnson
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501753304
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
Zaynab, first published in 1913, is widely cited as the first Arabic novel, yet the previous eight decades saw hundreds of novels translated into Arabic from English and French. This vast literary corpus influenced generations of Arab writers but has, until now, been considered a curious footnote in the genre's history. Incorporating these works into the history of the Arabic novel, Stranger Fictions offers a transformative new account of modern Arabic literature, world literature, and the novel. Rebecca C. Johnson rewrites the history of the global circulation of the novel by moving Arabic literature from the margins of comparative literature to its center. Considering the wide range of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century translation practices—including "bad" translation, mistranslation, and pseudotranslation—Johnson argues that Arabic translators did far more than copy European works; they authored new versions of them, producing sophisticated theorizations of the genre. These translations and the reading practices they precipitated form the conceptual and practical foundations of Arab literary modernity, necessitating an overhaul of our notions of translation, cultural exchange, and the global. Examining nearly a century of translations published in Beirut, Cairo, Malta, Paris, London, and New York, from Qiat Rūbinun Kurūzī (The story of Robinson Crusoe) in 1835 to pastiched crime stories in early twentieth-century Egyptian magazines, Johnson shows how translators theorized the Arab world not as Europe's periphery but as an alternative center in a globalized network. Stranger Fictions affirms the central place of (mis)translation in both the history of the novel in Arabic and the novel as a transnational form itself.

The Cambridge Companion to World Crime Fiction

The Cambridge Companion to World Crime Fiction PDF Author: Jesper Gulddal
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108605354
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
Accessible yet comprehensive, this first systematic account of crime fiction across the globe offers a deep and thoroughly nuanced understanding of the genre's transnational history. Offering a lucid account of the major theoretical issues and comparative perspectives that constitute world crime fiction, this book introduces readers to the international crime fiction publishing industry, the translation and circulation of crime fiction, international crime fiction collections, the role of women in world crime fiction, and regional forms of crime fiction. It also illuminates the past and present of crime fiction in various supranational regions across the world, including East and South Asia, the Arab World, Sub-Saharan Africa, Europe and Scandinavia, as well as three spheres defined by a shared language, namely the Francophone, Lusophone, and Hispanic worlds. Thoroughly-researched and broad in scope, this book is as valuable for general readers as for undergraduate and postgraduate students of popular fiction and world literature.

Egypt 1919

Egypt 1919 PDF Author: Dina Heshmat
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474458386
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
The first book offering an extensive analysis of literary and cinematic narratives dealing with the 1919 anti-colonial revolution in Egypt.

Literary Optics

Literary Optics PDF Author: Maha AbdelMegeed
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 0815657013
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
In Literary Optics, Maha AbdelMegeed offers a compelling and far-reaching alternative to the traditional mode of analyzing Arabic literature through an encounter between Arabic narrative forms and European ones. Drawing upon close engagements with the works of canonical authors from the period, including Hassan Husni al-Tuwayrani, Muhammad al-Muwaylihi, Ali Mubarak, Francis Marrash, and ‘Abdallah al-Nadim, AbdelMegeed addresses not where these works emanate from but rather how and why they were drawn together to form a canon. In doing so, she rejects the expectation that these texts, through the trope of encounter, hold the explanatory key to modern Arabic literature. In this reformulation of Arabic literary history, AbdelMegeed argues that the canon is forged through an urgency to define a new form of political sovereignty and to make history visible. In doing so, she explores three pivotal concepts: the spectral (khayal), the trace (athar) and the collective (alnas). By examining the texts through these concepts, Literary Optics provides a remarkable intellectual history that delves into the aesthetic, philosophical, and political stakes of nineteenth-century Arabic literature.

Ways of Seeking

Ways of Seeking PDF Author: Emily Drumsta
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520390199
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. In Ways of Seeking, Emily Drumsta traces the influence of detective fiction on the twentieth-century Arabic novel. Theorizing a “poetics of investigation,” she shows how these novels, far from staging awe-inspiring feats of logical deduction, mock the truth-seeking practices on which modern exercises of colonial and national power are often premised. Their narratives return to the archives of Arabic folklore, Islamic piety, and mysticism to explore less coercive ways of knowing, seeing, and seeking. Drumsta argues that scholars of the Middle East neglect the literary at their peril, overlooking key critiques of colonialism from the intellectuals who shaped and responded through fiction to the transformations of modernity. This book ultimately tells a different story about the novel’s place in the constellation of Arab modernism, modeling an innovative method of open-ended inquiry based on the literary texts themselves.

The Career and Communities of Zaynab Fawwaz

The Career and Communities of Zaynab Fawwaz PDF Author: Marilyn Booth
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192661337
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 531

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Book Description
Zaynab Fawwaz (d. 1914) emerged from an obscure childhood in the Shi'I community of Jabal 'Amil (now Lebanon) to become a recognized writer on women's and girls' aspirations and rights in 1890s Egypt. This book insists on the centrality of gender as a marker of social difference to the Arabic knowledge movement then, or Nahda. Fawwaz published essays and engaged in debates in the Egyptian and Ottoman-Arabic press, published two novels, and the first play known to have been composed in Arabic by a female writer. This book assesses her unusual life history and political engagements--including her work late in life as an informant for the Egyptian khedive. A series of thematically focused chapters takes up her views on social justice, marriage, divorce and polygyny, the 'gender-nature' debate in the context of local understandings of Darwinism, education, and imperialism and Islamophobia, attending also to works by those to whom Fawwaz was responding. Her role in the first Arabic women's magazine, and her contributions to later women's magazines, are part of the story, too. Further chapters consider her uses of history in fiction to criticize patriarchal control of young women's lives, and her play as an intervention into reformist theatre, and the question of women's access to public culture in 1890s Egypt. Questions of desirable masculinities are central to all of these. Fawwaz was also known for her massive biographical dictionary of world women. In that work as in her essays, Fawwaz articulated an ethics of social belonging and sociality predicated on Islamic precepts of gender justice, and critical of the ways male intellectuals had used 'tradition' to silence women and deny their aspirations.

Bildungsroman and the Arab Novel

Bildungsroman and the Arab Novel PDF Author: Maria Elena Paniconi
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1351357239
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
Through a close-reading of a corpus of novels featuring young protagonists in their path toward adulthood, the book shows how Bildungsroman impacted the formation of the Egyptian narrative. On a larger scale, the book helps the reader to understand the key role played by the coming of age novel in the definition and perception of modern Arab subjectivity. Exploring the role of Bildungsroman in shaping the canonical Egyptian novel, the book discusses the case of Zaynab by Muhammad Husayn Haykal (1913) as an example of early Arab Bildungsnarrative. It focuses on Latifa Zayyat’s masterpiece The Open Door and the novels of the 90es Generation, offering a gender-based analysis of the Egyptian Bildungsroman. It provides insightful readings about the function of the novel in women’s re-negotiation of social boundaries. The study shows how the stories of youth present universal themes such as the thwarted quest for love, the struggle for personal fulfilment, the desire to achieve a cultural modernity often felt as "other than self". The book is a journey in the Twentieth Century Egyptian Novel, seen through the lens of the transnational form of Bildungsroman. It is a key resource to students and academics interested in Arabic literature, comparative literature and cultural studies.