This issue of Alif is devoted to travel and travel-writing in the broadest cross-cultural sense and focuses on what Mahmoud Manzalauoui has termed indigenes, visitants, sojourners, and habitants or metics, particularly in Egypt and the Middle East. It is a tribute to Middle East scholar and acclaimed travel writer John Rodenbeck. Essays in this issue take a variety of approaches, ranging from the historical to the analytical and philosophical. Contributors include Sahar Sobhi Abdel-Hakim, Fadwa Adbel Rahman, Michael Haag, JDF Jones, Ceza Kassem, Nabil Matar, Malise Ruthven, Sarah Searight, and Terry Walz.
Alif 26
Wanderlust: Travel Literature of Egypt and the Middle East
Edited by
Ferial Ghazoul
1 September 2006
528 pp.
17X24cm
ISBN 9789774160110
For sale worldwide
$89.95
Also available by this author
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.
...read more
1 November 1996
e-book
206 pp.$9.99
This book is only available for purchase from Egypt
Related products
The Literary Atlas of Cairo
One Hundred Years on the Streets of the City
Edited with an introduction Samia MehrezBringing together writings by Egyptians, Arabs, men and women, Muslims, Copts, and Jews, this rich selection maps out many of the changes in Cairo’s geopolitics and its urban fabric, while tracing spatial and social forms of polarization and new patterns of inclusion and exclusion within the expanding megacity. Through its thematic organization, The Literary Atlas of Cairo traces the developments that have taken place over a century in modes of literary production, and presents a unique historical cross-section of the actors within the Cairene literary field, to provide an unprecedented, original, and indispensable educational and research tool for scholars and students as well as a much wider readership interested in Egypt and Cairo in particular as one of the globe’s largest historic, multi-cultural urban centers.
...read more
15 September 2016
Paperback
342 pp.15X23cm
$29.95
Alif 36
Friendship: Representations and Cultural Variations
Edited by Ferial GhazoulFriendship, though esteemed, has not been central in critical studies. It has been overshadowed by other bonding relationships. However, it figures as a privileged theme in classical, medieval, renaissance, and modern philosophy. More recently, sociological, anthropological, and psychological studies have explored the varied dimensions of friendship. Different cultures view friendship in various perspectives that intersect, contrast, and echo each other. In Middle Eastern, East Asian, European, and American thought, philosophers, jurists, and creative writers have explored the idea of friendship and their input is analyzed in this issue. Alif 36 foregrounds different ways of presenting friendship in diverse cultures and historical periods.
...read more
5 January 2017
Paperback
500 pp.16.5X24cm
$89.95
Alif 33
The Desert: Human Geography and Symbolic Economy
Edited by Ferial GhazoulThis interdisciplinary issue of the literary journal Alif is devoted to the desert—as a geographical locus and symbolic image—and to various texts related to it, drawn from literature and the arts, history and anthropology, film and environmental studies. Scholars from the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and North America contribute articles in Arabic, English, and French related to the visual representation of the desert in medieval iconography and in contemporary cinema, in American poetry and in pre-Islamic poetics, in human geography and in sociological thought, in French novels and in Arabic novels, in religious traditions and in ecological approaches, in travel literature and in critical discourse. Includes contributions by Saeed Alwakeel, Saad El Bazei, Sharif Elmusa, Jehan Farouk, Naglaa Hassan, Abdullah Ibrahim, Salma Mobarak, Senayon Olaoluwa, Yasmine Ramadan, Nathalie Roman, Randa Sabry.
...read more
15 July 2013
Paperback
600 pp.57
16.5X24cm
$89.95
Alif 27
Childhood: Creativity and Representation
Edited by Ferial GhazoulThis issue of Alif is published on the centennial anniversary of the founding the first Casa dei Bambini, a progressive educational institution for children, which seeks an alternative mode in bringing them up and nurturing their independence. An extract from the writings of the pedagogue of this innovative method, Maria Montessori, is here translated into Arabic for the first time. This collection covers the universe of children through interviews, photo-essays, testimonies, and articles in psychology, philosophy, law, music, fiction, media, poetry, and drama, addressing varied aspects of childhood: from Shakespeare for children to puppet theater in Egypt; from plays for dispossessed camp children to children enlisted in militias; from the affluent and leisurely childhood of Virginia Woolf to the wonders of the early years of a poet like Muhammad Afifi Matar. Essays also explore heroism and ethical values in children’s literature, as well as musical adaptations of children’s literature and the art and craft of making books for children. Alif Volume 27 Contributors: Abdelfattah Abusrour, Saeed Alwakeel, Nasseif Azmy, Mia Carter, Sharif S. Elmusa, Adib Fattal, Stephannie S. Gearhart, Ferial J. Ghazoul, Amanie Fawzi Habashi, Gala El Hadidi, Thomas Hartwell, Sayyid Hegab, Nadia El Kholy, Mohieddin al-Labbad, Muhammad Afifi Matar, Tanya M. Monforte, Maria Montessori, Yasmine Motawy, Naomi Shihab Nye, Michal Oklot, Mounira Soliman, Wiam El-Tamami, Matthew Whoolery.
...read more
1 March 2008
Paperback
404 pp.17X24cm
$89.95