Article Databases
- MLA International Bibliography This link opens in a new window Indexes critical materials on literature, languages, linguistics, and folklore. Includes citations from worldwide publications: periodicals, books, essay collections, working papers, proceedings, dissertations and bibliographies. Date coverage: 1920s - present.
- Index Islamicus This link opens in a new window Index to literature on Islam, the Middle East and Muslim areas of Asia and Africa, and Muslim minorities elsewhere. Includes journal articless, conference proceedings, monographs, and book reviews. Date coverage: 1906 - present.
- JSTOR This link opens in a new window This database provides full text access to the back issues of core scholarly journals in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Book reviews are included as well as journal articles. Abstracts are available for some of the articles. Date coverage: earliest issues of each journal up to the most current five years for most publications and to the present for some.
- Project Muse This link opens in a new window Project Muse provides digital access to scholarly journals and books in the humanities and social sciences. The scholarly content comes from non-profit scholarly publishers, including university presses and societies. The full text resources include journal articles, book reviews and book chapters.
- Literature Online (LION) This link opens in a new window LION includes texts, criticism, and reference material, including thousands of literary articles, essays, biographies and encyclopedia entries on over 350,000 works of poetry, prose, and drama from the 8th to the 21st century.
Naguib Mahfouz
Selected Books and Articles
- Gohar, Saddik. “Narrating the Marginalized Oriental Female: Silencing the Colonized Subaltern.” Acta Neophilologica, vol. 48, no. 1-2, 2015, pp. 49–66. A scrutinized reading of the early fiction of Naguib Mahfouz, particularly his masterpiece Midaq Alley, reveals that the author's outward tendency to offer what seems to be a neutral presentation of Egyptian-Arab women is thwarted by a hegemonic master narrative originated in local patriarchal traditions. It either marginalizes the female subaltern downsizing her role in the fictional canvas or conflates her with a status of gender inferiority by assigning her a role which conforms to her image in the patriarchal taxonomy of Oriental women.
- Scott, Bede. “‘A Raging Sirocco’: Structures of Dysphoric Feeling in Midaq Alley.” Journal of Arabic Literature, vol. 42, no. 1, 2011, pp. 29–48. his article explores the crisis initiated by colonial modernity in Naguib Mahfouz’s 1947 novel Midaq Alley. I begin by discussing the significance of anger within the narrative, arguing that this dominant structure of feeling could be read as a collective response to wider social and historical forces. In other words, rather than understanding emotion as the “subjective property” of the individual, I regard it here as a relational practice embedded within and determined by quite specific sociocultural circumstances. I then proceed to discuss the role of rumour in the novel and the significance of its pronounced melodramatic qualities.
The Aesthetic of Revolution in the Film and Literature of Naguib Mahfouz (1952-1967) by
In the wake of the 1952 Revolution, Egypt's future Nobel laureate in literature devoted himself exclusively to writing for film. The Aesthetic of Revolution in the Film and Literature of Naguib Mahfouz is the first full-length study in English to examine this critical period in the author's career and to contextualize it within the scope of post-revolutionary Egyptian politics and culture. Before returning to literature in 1959 with his post-revolutionary masterpiece Children of the Alley, Mahfouz wrote or co-wrote some twenty odd scripts, many of them among the most successful in Egyptian history. He did so at a time when film was the country's second largest export commodity after cotton and the domestic film industry in Egypt the fourth largest in the world. Artistically, his screenplays channeled the ideology of the revolution, often raising themes of oppression and liberation, and almost always within a storyline of criminal transgression. But as he discussed in later articles and interviews, the capacity for film to enumerate the flow of life--through montage, jump cuts, lighting, and close ups--helped him to develop a darker, faster, and more complex vision of society. This technological revolution was followed by a literary one in the 1960s, a time when Mahfouz would generate through a series of short, trenchant, and often comedic novellas, a deeply measured meditation on the experience of collective upheaval and the interpersonal impact of political transformation.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2014
Gender, Nation, and the Arabic Novel: Egypt, 1892-2008 by
A nuanced understanding of literary imaginings of masculinity and femininity in the Egytian novel. Gender studies in Arabic literature have become equated with women's writing, leaving aside the possibility of a radical rethinking of the Arabic literary canon and Arab cultural history. While the 'woman question' in the Arabic novel has received considerable attention, the 'male question' has gone largely unnoticed. Now, Hoda Elsadda bucks that trend.Foregrounding voices that have been marginalised alongside canonical works, she engages with new directions in the novel tradition.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2012
Modern Arabic Literature: A Theoretical Framework by
The study of Arabic literature is blossoming. This book provides a comprehensive theoretical framework to help research this highly prolific and diverse production of contemporary literary texts. Based on the achievements of historical poetics, in particular those of Russian formalism and its theoretical legacy, this framework offers flexible, transparent, and unbiased tools to understand the relevant contexts within the literary system. The aim is to enhance our understanding of Arabic literature, throw light on areas of literary production that traditionally have been neglected, and stimulate others to take up the fascinating challenge of mapping out and exploring them.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2017
'Anticipating' the 2011 Arab Uprisings: Revolutionary Literatures and Political Geographies by
This Palgrave Pivot volume explores an exciting range of powerful novels and memoirs from Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Syria that reveal political geographies of injustice and popular discontent thus 'anticipating' or imaginatively envisioning as well as participating in some of the major current upheavals in their particular national contexts.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2013
Jokha Alharthi
Selected Books and Articles
- Joseph, Jesna. “The Dynamics of Gendered Spaces in Jokha Alharthi’s Celestial Bodies.” New Literaria, vol. 4, no. 1, 2023, pp. 9–16, https://doi.org/10.48189/nl.2023.v04i1.002. Giving insight into a traditional Islamic society, Omani writer, JokhaAlharthi’s Celestial Bodies (2018) is a criticism against dominant ideologies and power hegemony. The paper analyses the critical relationship between gendered and spatial segmentation and challenges their supposed naturalness and validity. The unequal power relations that exist within the society produce different patterns of spatial relations with respect to access to public and private spaces. Through the theoretical framework of Feminist Geography, the paper criticises the gendered divisions of space and problematises the attempt of the enduring subjects to free themselves from the narrow space of patriarchal imagination and re-invent their lives in a space of their own.
- Yusoff, Rabiatul Adawiyah, and Raihanah M.M. “Moulding Lives, Shaping Destinies: Motherhood and Nation in Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi and A Golden Age by Tahmima Anam.” GEMA Online® Journal of Language Studies, vol. 22, no. 3, 2022, pp. 196–212, ht Female narratives hold an important place in literature as they tell stories from women’s perspectives, spatially and temporally. In Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi and A Golden Age by Tahmima Anam, the female characters play a significant role in determining the outcome of the story as their personal narratives run parallel to the history of Oman and Bangladesh in the 1970s, respectively. The paper examines the intersectionality of gendered narratives through the lens of motherhood and individual lives within a nation in both texts with the aim of uncovering its manifestation in both Omani and Bangladeshi societies. The methodology adopts the theory of parenting as a lens to examine the textual depiction of mothering within the two socio-cultural contexts of Oman and Bangladesh with a specific focus on Diana Baumrind’s categorisation of parenting styles. The findings suggest that the mothering styles portrayed in the two novels, namely authoritarian and permissive, are present in two distinct yet overlapping manners: one, within mother-daughter relationships grounded in cultural engagement, and two, through participation in nationhood. In addition, mothers in Celestial Bodies serve as witnesses to the cultural changes in Oman, creating intra-gender generational conflicts. In contrast, the mother figure in A Golden Age functions as the backbone of the youth’s participation in Bangladeshi liberation. Many of the choices made by the mothers in the two novels implicate the lives of the youth, society, and consequently the nation-states. The implication of this comparative reading shows that the mothering roles in women’s fiction are rich and multi-faceted as they partake in the pursuit of nationhood within and without the family institution.
- Dawn Chatty. “REJECTING AUTHENTICITY IN THE DESERT LANDSCAPES OF THE MODERN MIDDLE EAST: DEVELOPMENT PROCESSES IN THE JIDDAT IL-HARASIIS, OMAN.” Anthropology of the Middle East and North Africa, Indiana University Press, 2013, pp. 145-164. Nomads throughout the Middle East have been viewed through a lens of ro- mantic attachment or, latterly, uncomfortable disdain and disparagement. For decades they have been subjected to state-sponsored as well as international settlement efforts in the name of modernity, progress, and more recently en- vironmental protection. Peoples who move have challenged the neocolonial projects of the League of Nations Mandate era as well as the post–World War II independent nation by the sheer fact of their mobility. Movement, as Ernest Gellner pointed out, made these peoples “marginal” to the state, in that they could move out of the orbit of state control (Gellner 1969; also see Scott 2009). Despite efforts by central authorities to control and extend authority over these peoples, a political order outside the state continues to characterize nomads of the Middle East, with their tribal, kin-based social organization.
The Body in Arabic Love Poetry: The Udhri Tradition by
Jokha Alharthi re-appraises the relationship between love, poetry and Arab society in the 8th to 11th centuries. She avoids cliches about the purity of love in 'Udhri poetry, instead questioning the traditional emphasis on chastity and the assumption that this poetry omits any concept of the body.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2021
Oman, Culture and Diplomacy by
From colonial narratives and Cold War calculations to Iranian-US relations and the Middle East peace process, Oman has played an essential role in global diplomacy and international relations. For Oman, the idea of diplomacy refers not only to the country's interactions in the global community, but also to how Omani life itself is shaped by principles and practices of social and political engagement that are essentially diplomatic. Drawing on key research into Omani religious and social traditions, and ethnographic studies into Omani language and customs, this is the first book to connect Oman's international relations to its history, culture and social organisation.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2012
Cultivating the Past, Living the Modern: The Politics of Time in the Sultanate of Oman by
Cultivating the Past, Living the Modern explores how and why heritage has emerged as a prevalent force in building the modern nation state of Oman. Amal Sachedina analyses the relations with the past that undergird the shift in Oman from an Ibadi shari'a Imamate (1913-1958) to a modern nation state from 1970 onwards. Since its inception as a nation state, material forms in the Sultanate of Oman--such as old mosques and shari'a manuscripts, restored forts, national symbols such as the coffee pot or the dagger (khanjar), and archaeological sites--have saturated the landscape, becoming increasingly ubiquitous as part of a standardized public and visual memorialization of the past. Oman's expanding heritage industry, exemplified by the boom in museums, exhibitions, street montages, and cultural festivals, shapes a distinctly national geography and territorialized narrative. But Cultivating the Past, Living the Modern demonstrates there are consequences to this celebration of heritage. As the national narrative conditions the way people ethically work on themselves through evoking forms of heritage, it also generates anxieties and emotional sensibilities that seek to address the erasures and occlusions of the past.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2021
Oman Since 1856 by
Oman, a state in southeastern Arabia, is a prime example of a country that has not benefited greatly from modernization, but instead has fallen into economic and political insignificance as a result of economic and technological innovations introduced by the West. Prior to the nineteenth century Mr. Landen finds that native Omanis had developed a thriving maritime industry which was responsible for the country's economic health. With the advent of colonialism from the West, Oman's fortunes declined. The changes that took place, the influence of British leaders who directed the political activities in Oman, and the internal politics of Oman are all considered. The last chapter contains speculations on the effect of the discovery of oil on the future of Oman. Originally published in 1967. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2015
Dissertations
A.B. Yehoshua
Selected Books and Articles
- Ramras-Rauch, Gila. “A. B. Yehoshua and the Sephardic Experience.” World Literature Today, vol. 65, no. 1, 1991, pp. 8–13, https://doi.org/10.2307/40146111. A. B. Yehoshua's early fiction was largely symbolic and surrealistic, but it had the realistic perspective of the "Israeli condition." His Shephardic roots emerge in "The Lover" and "Mr. Mani."
- Mendelson-Maoz, Adia. “The Bereaved Father and His Dead Son in the Works of A.B. Yehoshua.” Jewish Social Studies, vol. 17, no. 1, 2011, pp. 116–40. In recent years, A. B. Yehoshua has been taken to task for tempering his criticism of Israeli politics and shifting closer to the political center. In this article, I shift the discussion to a historical and poetic perspective through an interpretive evaluation of the bereaved father figure in Yehoshua's oeuvre. His approach to the bereaved father has undergone a radical transformation. This is clearly seen in his latest works in which he has made the transition from a critical stance toward the bereaved father—one of the most potent images of Zionist ideology—to a more moderate position reflecting internalization and acceptance of bereavement. To investigate this development, I explore the use of the bereavement myth in several of Yehoshua's works and offer a detailed comparison of his early novella Bi-techilat kayits 1970 (Early in the Summer of 1970; 1972) and his more recent work Esh yedidutit (Friendly Fire: A Duet; 2007).
- Halevi-Wise, Yael. “A. B. Yehoshua and the Novel of Vocation.” Prooftexts, vol. 37, no. 3, 2019, pp. 688–710, https://doi.org/10.2979/prooftexts.37.3.19. Regardless of their specific professional identities as doctors, engineers, teachers or supervisors of various sorts, Yehoshua's characters tend to function as repairmen or repairwomen, tasked first with fixing themselves and then their families and nation through the social mosaic that Yehoshua builds in his novels. In an effort to overcome a crisis in their private lives, Yehoshua's characters learn to establish more attentive relationships not only within their close family circles but also in their workplaces, where they come into contact with representatives of diverse ethnicities, ages, ideologies, and religions. Following the tradition of the bildungsroman, the vocational pursuits of Yehoshua's characters are intertwined with family responsibilities and a search for love. However, by turning professional responsibilities into a higher calling, Yehoshua also engages with questions of national development in a manner that reconfigures the vocational mission of the prophets.
Voices of Israel: Essays on and Interviews with Yehuda Amichai, A. B. Yehoshua, T. Carmi, Aharon Appelfeld, and Amos Oz by
Cohen takes an in-depth critical look at three novelists and two poets who stand at the forefront of contemporary Israeli literature, and whose works have been widely read, studied, and admired in the Western world. The critiques examine all English translations of these Israeli writers' major works from the beginning of their careers up to the present. Cohen demonstrates the vitality and virtuosity of the so-called New Wave Israeli writers whose sources and influences are as ancient as the stories of the Hebrew Bible and as modern as the interiorization of reality found in Proust, Faulkner, Woolf, and Joyce; and the literary adaptation of relativity found in Borges, Lowry, and Durrell. Complementing the critiques are interviews with the five Israeli writers. The issues discussed--the relation of politics and literature, the influence of literature on life, the role of the writer in society, the moral responsibility of the writer--combine with the essays to provide comprehensive insight into the contemporary Israeli psyche.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 1990
The Literary Imagination in Israel-Palestine: Orientalism, Poetry, and Biopolitics by
This book presents a cutting-edge critical analysis of the trope of miscegenation and its biopolitical implications in contemporary Palestinian and Israeli literature, poetry, and discourse. The relationship between nationalism and demographics are examined through the narrative and poetic intrigue of intimacy between Arabs and Jews, drawing from a range of theoretical perspectives, including public sphere theory, orientalism, and critical race studies. Revisiting the controversial Brazilian writer Gilberto Freyre, who championed miscegenation in his revisionary history of Brazil, the book deploys a comparative investigation of Palestinian and Israeli writers' preoccupation with the mixed romance. Author Hella Bloom Cohen offers new interpretations of works by Mahmoud Darwish, A.B. Yehoshua, Orly Castel-Bloom, Nathalie Handal, and Rula Jebreal, among others.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2016
Marjane Satrapi
Selected Books and Articles
- Nabizadeh, Golnar. “Vision and Precarity in Marjane Satrapi’s ‘Persepolis.’” Women’s Studies Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 1/2, 2016, pp. 152–67, https://doi.org/10.1353/wsq.2016.0014. What does it mean to survive, and when, and how, does survival matter? As the editors of this special issue have suggested, To survive is messy, elaborate, layered, contingent as it is on biological, political, and material conditions that support life or liveliness. The claim for the renewed centrality of survival in modern times rests on the recognition of widespread threats to human life, social, and physical environments brought about by political violence, social persecution, and ecological crises. Domestic violence, the right to abortion, and equal pay are only a few of the additional issues that disproportionately impact women's lives. Survival is always contingent on the unfolding of an event's horizon and is shaped by evolving circumstances rather than guaranteed. With these permutations in mind, in this article, the author explore the multiple modalities of survival in Marjane Satrapi's autographic memoir, Persepolis. Influenced by Art Spiegelman's Maus and David B.'s Epileptic, Satrapi's comic skillfully addresses difficult subjects through an iconic visual style.
Familiar and Foreign : Identity in Iranian Film and Literature by
The current political climate of confrontation between Islamistregimes and Western governments has resulted in the proliferation ofessentialist perceptions of Iran and Iranians in the West. Suchperceptions do not reflect the complex evolution of Iranian identitythat occurred in the years following the Constitutional Revolution(1906-11) and the anti-imperialist Islamic Revolution of 1979.Despite the Iranian government's determined pursuance ofanti-Western policies and strict conformity to religious principles,the film and literature of Iran reflect the clash between a nostalgicpride in Persian tradition and an apparent infatuation with a moreEurocentric modernity. In Familiar and Foreign, Mannani andThompson set out to explore the tensions surrounding the ongoingformulation of Iranian identity by bringing together essays on poetry,novels, memoir, and films. These include both canonical and less widelytheorized texts, as well as works of literature written in English byauthors living in diaspora. Challenging neocolonialist stereotypes, these critical excursionsinto Iranian literature and film reveal the limitations of collectiveidentity as it has been configured within and outside of Iran. Throughthe examination of works by, among others, the iconic female poetForugh Farrokhzad, the expatriate author Goli Taraqqi, thecontroversial memoirist Azar Nafisi, and the graphic novelist MarjaneSatrapi, author of Persepolis, this volume engages with thecomplex and contested discourses of religion, patriarchy, and politicsthat are the contemporary product of Iran's long andrevolutionary history.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2015
Women, Art, and Literature in the Iranian Diaspora by
The manuscript is a work of cultural studies, arguing that "art"--creative work in various forms--can serve to help transcend political binaries and foster identification of the political/ethnic "other." Specifically, it examines the work of Iranian women visual artists and writers living in the diaspora, including well-known figures like Marjane Satrapi and Shirin Neshat, and up-and-comers such as Amir Soltani and Parsua Bashi. Ebrahimi explores both classic and hybrid art forms, including graphic novels and photo-poetry, to advocate for the importance of aesthetics to inform and influence a global community.
Location: OnlineISBN: 9780815654827Publication Date: 2019
Representation and Memory in Graphic Novels by
This book analyses the relationship between comics and cultural memory. By focussing on a range of landmark comics from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the discussion draws attention to the ongoing role of visual culture in framing testimony, particularly in relation to underprivileged subjects such as migrants and refugees, individuals dealing with war and oppressive regimes and individuals living with particular health conditions. The discussion is influenced by literary and cultural debates on the intersections between ethics, testimony, trauma, and human rights, reflected in its three overarching questions: 'How do comics usually complicate the production of cultural memory in local contents and global mediascapes?', 'How do comics engage with, and generate, new forms of testimonial address?', and 'How do the comics function as mnemonic structures?' The author highlights that the power of comics is that they allow both creators and readers to visualise the fracturing power of violence and oppression - at the level of the individual, domestic, communal, national and international - in powerful and creative ways. Comics do not stand outside of literature, cinema, or any of the other arts, but rather enliven the reciprocal relationship between the verbal and the visual language that informs all of these media. As such, the discussion demonstrates how fields such as graphic medicine, graphic justice, and comics journalism contribute to existing theoretical and analytics debates, including critical visual theory, trauma and memory studies, by offering a broad ranging, yet cohesive, analysis of cultural memory and its representation in print and digital comics. g power of violence and oppression - at the level of the individual, domestic, communal, national and international - in powerful and creative ways. Comics do not stand outside of literature, cinema, or any of the other arts, but rather enliven the reciprocal relationship between the verbal and the visual language that informs all of these media. As such, the discussion demonstrates how fields such as graphic medicine, graphic justice, and comics journalism contribute to existing theoretical and analytics debates, including critical visual theory, trauma and memory studies, by offering a broad ranging, yet cohesive, analysis of cultural memory and its representation in print and digital comics.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2019
