ABSTRACT
I have begun with the issue of the novel to highlight what may be the most fundamental ambition of this study-to rethink the landscape of nineteenthcentury literary production in what we still term “the Middle East” and “the West,” by sidestepping the limits of both the novel and the nation. This project instead argues that before the full deployment of nationalist discourse, the destiny of literary production was not yet foretold within the history of any specific narrative form. Thus, this project aims to produce a literary history of this period that sharpens the focus of the varied engagements with modernity within Arabic, English, and Persian-speaking societies, engagements that did not view modernity as prefiguring the nationalist discourses that were to emerge as dominant by the end of the nineteenth century. In one sense, the novel has served as a marker for the social and intellectual movements that came to coalesce around nationalist discourses. By disentangling the intellectual history of this period from the teleological reading of developments in nineteenth-century prose writing as culminating in the novel, we can also begin to view this history outside of the evaluative criteria of nationalism. One way to embark is by proposing that the telos of modernity itself is and has been a highly contested one, with neither nationalism nor the novel prewritten as its meridian in either the political or literary registers. By relegating both novel and nation to margins of its narrative, the literary history here proposed focuses on the issues that both of the former repress: interlinguistic subjectivities, ambiguous imaginative geographies, and dynamic shifts in cultural register. These phenomena, while often rooted in premodern cultural and intercultural relations, are markers of the episodes of contingent modernities represented by many nineteenth-century literary productions.
