This issue of Alif is devoted to exploring creative texts by authors from the Arab world (including Karim Alrawi, Edward Said, Rafik Schami, and Ahdaf Soueif) who write in foreign languages: Dutch, English, French, German, and Hebrew. Contributors: English Section: Shereen Abou El Naga, Magda Amin, Soraya Antonius, Anne Armitage, Andrea Flores, Nadia Gindi, Richard Jacquemond, Mahmoud El Lozy, Amin Malak, Khaled Mattawa, Cynthia Nelson, Marlous Willemsen. Arabic Section: Etel Adnan, Mahamed Lamine Ould Moulay Brahim, Ferial J. Ghazoul, Edwar al-Kharrat, Walid El Khachab, Abdelwahab Meddeb, Samia Mehrez, Dalia Said Mostafa, Tahia Abdel Nasser, Mahmoud Qassim, Bashir El-Siba’i, Anton Shammas, Muhammad Siddiq, Ahdaf Soueif.
Alif 20
The Hybrid Literary Text: Arab Creative Authors Writing in Foreign Languages
Edited by
Ferial Ghazoul
538 pp.
17X24cm
ISBN 9789774245909
For sale worldwide
75
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Nocturnal Poetics
The Arabian Nights in Comparative Context
Ferial J. GhazoulThe Book of a Thousand and One Nights, better known as The Arabian Nights, is a classic of world literature and the most universally known work of Arabic narrative. Although much has been written about it, Professor Ghazoul’s analysis is the first to apply modern critical methodology to the study of this intricate and much-admired literary masterpiece. The author draws on a wealth of critical tools — medieval Arabic aesthetics and poetics, mythology and folklore, allegory and comedy, postmodern literary criticism, and formal and structural analysis — to explain the specific genius of the The Arabian Nights. The author describes and examines the internal cohesion of the book, establishing its morphology and revealing the dialectics of the frame-story and enframed cycles of narrative. She discusses various forms of narrative — folk epics, animal fables, Sindbad voyages, and demon stories — and analyzes them in relation to narrative works from India, Europe, and the Americas. Covering an impressive range of writings, from ancient Indian classics to the works of Shakespeare and the modern writers Jorge Luis Borges and John Barth, she places The Arabian Nights in the context of an ongoing storytelling tradition and reveals its influence on world literature.
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206 pp.8.99
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