Novel.

As well as a rare examination of Egyptian literature, this volume includes a non-themed section of Featured Articles and a Literary Supplement.

Egyptians are known among the Arabs as awlād al-nukta, Sons of the Jokes, for their ability to laugh in face of adversity. This creative weapon has been directed against socio-political targets both in times of oppression and popular upheaval, such as the 2011 Tahrir Revolution. This book looks at the literary expression of Egyptian humour in the novels of Muḥammad Mustajāb, Khayrī Shalabī, and Ḥamdī Abū Julayyil, three writers who revive the comic tradition to innovate the language of contemporary fiction. Their modern tricksters, wise fools, and antiheroes play with the stereotypical traits attached to the ordinary Egyptians, while laughing at the universal contradictions of life. This ability to combine local and global culture, literary traditions and popular references, makes them a stimulating read in an intercultural perspective. Combining humour studies and literary criticism, this book examines language play and narrative creativity to understand which strategies craft Egyptian literary humour. In doing so, it sheds light on the contribution of humour to literary innovations of Egyptian fiction since the late Seventies, while adding new writers to those who are considered the masters of humour in the Arab novel.

Arabic fiction.

With this book, we aim to help communities initiate and sustain local systems change. Experiences from a variety of transfer projects between universities and civil society in different countries and cultures are included. The focus is on the development of methodological competencies, which we explain along the Design Thinking process and provide with practical implementation recommendations. This is followed by a case study detailing how business models are developed from tested prototypes for social innovations and social enterprises and how business plans are created. The book is aimed at anyone involved in working in and with communities. This includes students, teachers, and action researchers from academia as well as staff in city governments or NGOs and, of course, members of communities who want to grow into the role of community promoter.

Suitable for the classroom but completely accessible to the general reader, this volume presents many of the most interesting authors writing today from an Islamic background—Kamel Daoud, Yasmine el Rashidi, Hisham Matar, Tahar Djaout, Mohsin Hamid, Hanif Kureishi, Edward Said, Driss Chaibi, Kamila Shamsie, Tahar ben Jelloun, Leila Aboulela, Abdellah Taïa, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Hisham Matar, Eboo Patel, Reza Aslan, and Tamim Ansary, among others—who embody the various strains of Islamic interpretation and conflict. This study discusses an ongoing Reformation in Islam, focusing on the Arab Spring, the role of women and sexuality, the “clash of civilizations,” assimilation and cosmopolitanism, jihad, pluralism across cultures, free speech and apostasy. In an atmosphere of political and religious awakening, these authors search for a voice for individual rights while nations seek to restore a “disrupted destiny.” Questions of “de-Arabization” of the religion, ecumenicism, comparative modernities, and the role of literature thread themselves throughout the chapters of the book.

Narrating Postcolonial Arab Nations significantly enhances the interface between postcolonial literary studies and the hitherto under-studied Arab world. Lindsey Moore brings together canonical and less familiar Arab novels and memoirs from the last half century to consider colonial continuities and consequences. Literary narratives are shown to oppose repressive versions of nationalism and to track desire lines toward more hospitable nations. The literatures discussed in this book enable a deeper historical understanding of twenty-first century Arab uprisings and their aftermaths. The book analyzes four rich sites of literary production: Egypt, Algeria, Lebanon, and Palestine. Moore explores ways in which authors critique particular nation-state formations and decolonizing histories, engage the general problematic of ‘the nation’, and redefine, repurpose, and transcend national literary canons. Chapter One contrasts Egyptian literary representations of popular revolt with official revolutionary discourse. Chapter Two addresses the enduring legacy of anti-colonial violence in Algeria and the place of Albert Camus in its literature. Chapter Three uses narratives of gender violence on the Beirut front line to reveal the divisibility and intersectional identity politics of postcolonial nation-states. Chapter Four emphasizes ways in which Palestinian memoirs insist upon remembering towards a postcolonial future. The book provides detailed analysis of literary narratives by Etel Adnan, Rabih Alameddine, Alaa al-Aswany, Rachid Boudjedra, Albert Camus, Rashid al-Daïf, Assia Djebar, Ghada Karmi, Naguib Mahfouz, Jean Said Makdisi, Edward Said, Boualem Sansal, Raja Shehadeh, Miral al-Tahawy, and Latifa al-Zayyat. It is an indispensable volume for students and scholars of Postcolonial, Arab, and World literatures.

Time permeates language, society, and individual lives, but time eludes definition. From grand scales of geologic time to the exasperation of waiting in endless bureaucratic lines, from the unifying sense of ancestral presence at an ancient monument to the imminent question of climate resilience, this volume presents conceptions of time through a kaleidoscope of cultures and disciplines. Accessible to students and scholars alike, the book demonstrates that far from natural, stable, or singular, time is culturally dependent, historically contingent, socially constructed, and disciplinarily specific – and that multidisciplinary and cross-cultural conversations transform our understanding of time.

In Western societies, many traditional feminist claims have already been fulfilled both in law and in official discourse. Indeed, legislative steps have already been taken towards securing civil and political rights and equal opportunities for women. This, of course, is not the case in many other regions of the world, as some of the chapters in this book clearly testify. Yet, notwithstanding the gains achieved in Western societies, residual forms of resistance and prejudice still persist in discourses, categories and discriminative practices in this so-called “post-feminist” era. Furthermore, new manifestations of asymmetries in gender relations and new ways of thinking and experiencing subjectivity are currently emerging, as a result of growing globalisation, economic crises, migration patterns, female sex and labour trafficking, trans-nationalism, and new technologies, not to mention the beauty and body sculpting industries.

Women have consistently been left out of the official writing of Lebanese history, and nowhere is this more obvious than in writing on the Lebanese Civil War. As more and more histories of the war begin to circulate, few include any in-depth discussion of the multiple roles women played in wartime Lebanon. Fewer still address the essential issues of women’s work and their creative production, such as literature, performance art, and filmmaking. Developed out of a larger oral history project collecting and archiving the ways in which women narrated their experiences of the Lebanese Civil War, this book focuses on a wide range of subjects, all framed as women telling their “war stories.” Each of the six chapters centers on women who worked or created art during the war, revealing, in their own words, the challenges, struggles, and resistance they faced during this tumultuous period of Lebanese history.