Literary Criticism : Middle Eastern

From the bestselling author of the Booker Prize finalist The Map of Love –an incisive collection of essays on Arab identity, art, and politics that seeks to locate the mezzaterra, or common ground, in an increasingly globalized world. The twenty-five years’ worth of criticism and commentary collected here have earned Ahdaf Soueif a place among our most prominent Arab intellectuals. more...

Price: $14.95

This book focuses on the relationship between the Egyptian village as a discursive construct and the novel genre as it emerged and developed in Egypt from the first decades of the century until its end. more...

Price: $180.00

This book uses insights from religious studies, literary theory, and the history of science for understanding the Sumerian composition Nanše and the Birds in the context of the Old Babylonian scribal school. It contains editions of all the relevant Sumerian texts. more...

Price: $175.00

Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, Marjane Satrapi’s comics, and “Baghdad Blogger” Salam Pax’s Internet diary are just a few examples of the new face of autobiography in an age of migration, globalization, and terror. But while autobiography and other genres of life writing can help us attend to people whose experiences are frequently unseen and unheard, life narratives can also be easily co-opted into propaganda. In Soft Weapons, Gillian Whitlock explores the dynamism and ubiquity of contemporary life writing about the Middle East and shows how these works have been packaged, promoted, and enlisted in Western controversies. Considering recent autoethnographies of Afghan women, refugee testimony from Middle Eastern war zones, Jean Sasson’s bestsellers about the lives of Arab women, Norma Khouri’s fraudulent memoir Honor Lost, personal accounts by journalists reporting the war in Iraq, Satrapi’s Persepolis, Nafisi’s book, and Pax’s blog, Whitlock explores the contradictions and ambiguities in the rapid commodification of life memoirs. Drawing from the fields of literary and cultural studies, Soft Weapons will be essential reading for scholars of life writing and those interested in the exchange of literary culture between Islam and the West. more...

Price: $20.00

This work deals with concepts of time in pre-Islamic Arabic poetry and in the Koran, placing them in relation to Hellenistic conceptions of time in Late Antique poetry. The analysis shows that just as in the much earlier field of Greek poetry, so too in Old Arabic verse time is seen as an inescapable power. The Arabic concept for endless time, dahr, is revealed to be the Arabic equivalent of the Greek concept aión. In the Koran the power of time is denied completely and replaced by the absolute power of God, which is described with the help of Hellenistic conceptions of time. The research suggests the existence of an Arabic Hellenism, in the context of which Islam came into being. more...

Price: $137.00