ABSTRACT

The book locates questions of languages, genre, textuality and canonicity within a historical and theoretical framework that foregrounds the emergence of modern nationalism in Egypt. The ways in which the cultural discourses produced by twentieth century Egyptian nationalism created a space for both a hegemonic and counter-hegemonic politics of language, class and place that inscribed a bifurcated narrative and social geography, are examined. The book argues that the rupture between the village and the city contained in the Egyptian nationalism discourse is reproduced as a narrative dislocation that has continued to characterize and shape the Egyptian novel in general and the village novel in particular. Reading the village novel in Egypt as a dynamic intertext that constructs modernity in a local historical and political context rather than rehearsing a simple repetition of dominant European literary-critical paradigms, this book offers a new approach to the construction of modern Arabic literary history as well as to theoretical questions related to the structure and role of the novel as a worldly narrative genre.

chapter |24 pages

Introduction

The peasant and modern narrative in Egypt

chapter |35 pages

The Garrulous Peasant

Ya‘qub Sannu‘, ‘Abdallah al-Nadim and the construction of the fallah in early drama and dialogue

chapter |31 pages

Novels and Nations

chapter |36 pages

Foundations

Pastoral and anti-Pastoral

chapter |32 pages

The Politics of Reality

Realism, neo-realism and the village novel

chapter |26 pages

The Land

chapter |29 pages

The Exiled Son

chapter |15 pages

The Storyteller

chapter |5 pages

Conclusion