Böcker av Wen-chin Ouyang

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 that are 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 history, as a story of grappling with and resisting the hegemony of both the state and cultural heritage.Key Features* 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* 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 QabbaniKeywords: The Arabic novel; Arabic storytelling; Nation and national history; Identity; Subjectivity; Intertextuality; Nostalgia; Cultural heritage and tradition; Madness; Ideology of madness; Semiotics of tyranny; Naguib Mahfouz/Najib Mahfuz; 'Abd al-Khaliq al-Rikabi; Jamal al-Ghitani/Gamal Ghitany; Ben Salem Himmich; Ali Mubarak; Adonis/Adunis; Mahmoud Darwish; Nizar Qabbani; Biography/autobiography; Historiography.

Considers the Arabic novel within the triangle of the nation-state, modernity and tradition.The novel is now a major genre in the Arabic literary field; this book explores the development of the novel, especially the ways in which the genre engages with aesthetics, ethics and politics in a cross-cultural context and from a transnational perspective.It takes love and desire as the central tropes through which the Arabic novel tells the tale of its search for form in a world mapped by conflicting ideas. As it falls in love with the nation-state, the Arabic novel flirts with modernity and lives uncomfortably with tradition. The love triangle it creates is at once an expression of its will to participate in the politics, its interrogation of ethics of storytelling, and its search for new aesthetics. The story of the Arabic novel is presented as a series of failed, illegitimate love affairs, all tainted by its suspicion of the legitimacy of the nation, modernity and tradition, and above all by its misgiving about its own propriety.Keywords: The Arabic novel; Nation and nationalism; Arabic poetics of love; Modernity and modernisation; Politics of desire; Poetics of space; Women and cartography of nation; Identity; Intertexutality; Naguib Mahfouz/Najib Mahfuz; Ghassan Kanafani; Ibrahim Nasrallah; Emil Habiby; Jamal al-Ghitani/Gamal Ghitany; Ali Mubarak; Muhammad al-Muwaylihi; Badr Shakir al-Sayyab; Khalil Hawi; Salah 'Abd al-Sabur; Arabian Nights; Maqamat; Khitat.

A refreshing new interdisciplinary slant on magical realism as an international literary phenomenon emerging from the trauma of colonial dispossession.