The Oxford Handbook of Arab Novelistic Traditions (Oxford Handbooks) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0199349797 ISBN 13: 9780199349791

Publisher: OUP USA, 2017

Synopsis

The Oxford Handbook of Arab Novelistic Traditions is the most comprehensive treatment of the subject to date. In scope, the book encompasses the genesis of the Arabic novel in the second half of the nineteenth century and its development to the present in every Arabic-speaking country and in Arab immigrant destinations on six continents. Editor Waïl S. Hassan and his contributors describe a novelistic phenomenon which has pre-modern roots, stretching centuries back within the Arabic cultural tradition, and branching outward geographically and linguistically to every Arab country and to Arab writing in many languages around the world.

The first of three innovative dimensions of this Handbook consists of examining the ways in which the Arabic novel emerged out of a syncretic merger between Arabic and European forms and techniques, rather than being a simple importation of the latter and rejection of the former, as early critics of the Arabic novel claimed. The second involves mapping the novel geographically as it took root in every Arab country, developing into often distinct though overlapping and interconnected local traditions. Finally, the Handbook concerns the multilingual character of the novel in the Arab world and by Arab immigrants and their descendants around the world, both in Arabic and in at least a dozen other languages. The Oxford Handbook of Arab Novelistic Traditions reflects the current status of research in the broad field of Arab novelistic traditions and signals toward new directions of inquiry.

About this title

Review:

Waïl Hassan's Oxford Handbook of Arabic Novelistic Traditions is a great addition to the fields of Arabic and comparative literatures. It will be a useful reference for students and more advanced scholars alike... [it] arrives to solicitously build a new, more inclusive, and more global perspective on Arabic novels. This move is more than welcome. (Journal of Arabic Literature)

About the Author:

Waïl S. Hassan is a Professor of Comparative and World Literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. A specialist in modern Arabic literature and intellectual history, he is the author of Tayeb Salih: Ideology and the Craft of Fiction (2003) and Immigrant Narratives: Orientalism and Cultural Translation in Arab American and Arab British Literature (OUP, 2011).

About this edition

• Publisher: OUP USA
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0199349797
• ISBN 13: 9780199349791
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 776
• Editor: Hassan Waïl S.