Intro -- TABLE OF CONTENTS -- Abbreviations and Editorial Notes -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction. Prefatory Thresholds: Scheherazade Avenged -- Chapter One. Postcolonial Matters in Arabic Narrative -- In Theory -- Postcolonial Discourse -- Identity Formation -- The Active Body Politic -- And the Awakening Discourse -- Women Issues -- The Problematic of Anti-Colonial Discourse -- The Reductionist in the Postcolonial -- Discursive Alliances against Neopatriarchy -- Politics of Discontent: Postmodernism and Postcoloniality -- Neo-Patriarchy and Neo-Colonialism -- The Fight for Narrative Space -- History Revisited: Against Imperial Readings -- Chapter Two. Writing Scheherazade Now: The Growth of Modern Arabic Fiction -- The Scheherazade Trope -- Elitism and Populism -- Canons in Arabic -- The Bourgeois Epic -- Post-Nahdah Popular Narrative -- Scheherazade's Appeal: Stages and Attitudes -- Chapter Three. Debating Ambivalence: Socio-Political Engagements -- The Experimental and the Indigenous -- The Real and the Allegorical of the Land -- The Urban Complex -- Individualism and Democracy -- Narrating the Postcolonial -- The Return of Epistolary Form -- Public Intellectuals: Types and Characters -- Outsiders or Heroes -- Post-modernity Discontents -- Creativity and Dissent -- Undermining Unitary Discourse -- Debating Novels of Apprenticeship -- Apprenticeship as Identity Affirmation -- The Colonial Referent -- Chapter Four. Arabs and the West: Counternarratives and Narrative Encounters -- Arabs' Others -- Existentialist Thought in Arabic Narrative -- Image-Making -- Thresholds for East-West Encounters -- Arab Homecoming -- The Encounter's Postcolonial Intertext -- Chapter Five. Women in Arabic -- Veiling and Unveiling -- Dunyazad Avenged -- Discoursing Women -- Women's Writings: Examples -- Feminist Politics and Poetics: An Overview.

The Female Body as Confrontational Site -- Women's Ancestry: Anxieties of Belonging -- Identity Regained in War -- Body Politics: Self-Affirmation vs. Symbols and Acts of Denial -- Female Consciousness and Male Intrusions -- Identity Nexus: Nation and Women -- Debating Revolutionary Rhetoric -- The Male Tradition in Women's Consciousness -- A Voice of Their Own -- Male Feminism -- Desire as Narrative -- Colony for the Divorced -- Decolonizing Women: Agendas and Discursive Strategies -- And Against Masculine Discourse -- Male Fantasies -- Ideology and Desire: The Male Views -- Chapter Six. A Voice for Dissent: Rogues, Rebels and Saints -- Narrating Dissent -- Sociological Consciousness -- The Futuwwah Redrawn -- The Advent of Shaykhs -- Knaves and Rogues -- Rebels -- Graveyard Populations -- Shepherds and Dervishes -- Chapter Seven. Site as Narrative -- Memory and Forgetfulness: The House -- Site as a Nation-State -- Spatial Narrative Variations -- 1. The Chronotope -- 2. The Ironic Site -- 3. The Poetic and the Representational -- 4. The Journey against Cultural Hegemony -- 5. Thresholds of Ambivalence -- 6A. Site as Narrative Inversion -- 6B. The Female Interrogator -- 7. Poetics of Inversion: Sites of Shiite Rituals -- 8. Banquets as Language Sites -- 9. Sites of Micro-politics -- Chapter Eight. Time in Narrative -- Retrospective Time -- Process Time -- The Polytemporal as Textual Density -- Time Flux -- The National and the Personal as Time Schemes -- Sufi Time -- Mad time -- Dead or Collective Time? -- Time In-Between: The Cyclical and the Eternal -- Undermining Clock Time -- Chapter Nine. Cultural Contestation and Self-Definition in Arabic Metafiction -- The Author in the Text -- Debating Representation -- Theorizations for Narrative as Invention -- Metafiction and Historiography -- Metafictional Critical Typologies.

1. Textualizing Social Dissent -- 2. Transference and Transposition: The Textual and the Personal -- 3. Narrative Fragmentation and Dissident Politics -- 4. Idealizing the Narratee -- 5. Reclaiming the Suppressed -- 6. Embodying Abstractions -- 7. Building up Sites of Selfhood -- Chapter Ten. Scheherazade's Gifts: Mahfū's Narrative Stategies in Layālī Alf Laylah -- In Lieu of Conclusion -- Bibliograpphy -- Arabic Novels & Relevant Writings -- Criticism -- A. In Arabic -- B. In European Languages -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- V -- W -- Z.

This work covers the postcolonial in Arabic fiction. It discusses and questions a large number of novels show cultural diversity in the Arab world. It highlights engagements with postcolonial issues that relate to identity formation, the modern nation-state, individualism, and nationalism.

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Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2018. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.