Occidentalism and the Egyptian Novel: Politics, Poetics and Modernity

Through a diachronic study of Egyptian novels, from the early Twentieth century to the Arab Spring, Occidentalism and the Egyptian Novel provides a new approach to the study of Occidentalism in modern Arabic literature and examines how deployment of the European theme unfolds the authors’ conceptions of modernity, national identity and political community. Hence, this work moves away from existing descriptive approaches in the study of ‘the East-West encounter’ to investigate what lies behind the narrative constructions of these civilisational divides. To this end, this literary study is informed by current transdisciplinary debates in Occidentalist studies and the History of Ideas, but also by the long tradition of the Sociology of Literature. The book first examines the way references to Europe were used strategically in the construction of the Egyptian national imaginary and the dissemination of specific ideas of modernity from 1913 to 1933, when the novel genre attained social recognition. Particular focus is then dedicated to the study of the European woman trope from the 1930s onwards. The 1960s marked the beginning of a new trend in the characterisation of European heroines and in the functions of the trope. The book follows this process up to the aftermath of the Arab Spring and relates it to the authors’ new positioning vis-à-vis the cultural hegemony of state-sponsored nationalist discourse. The book also examines several typologies of contemporary texts by female authors where personal identity and political community are not framed within the paradigm of the nation state.