| Description |
xiii, 271 pages ; 22 cm |
| Contents |
Fictional genealogies -- The god abandons the murderess: or, murder as opposition? -- In the flickering light of Umm Hāshim's lamp -- Of noisy trains and grass pillows -- Doubling: the (immigrant) worker as (exiled) writer -- Deserts of memory -- Hunting whales and elephants, (re)producing narratives -- In other words, in other worlds: in place of a conclusion |
| Summary |
If the modern Western novel is linked to the rise of a literate bourgeoisie with particular social values and narrative expectations, to what extent can that history of the novel be anticipated in non-Western contexts? In this bold, insightful work Mary Layoun investigates the development of literary practice in the Greek, Arabic, and Japanese cultures, which initially considered the novel a foreign genre, a cultural accoutrement of "Western" influence. Offering a textual and contextual analysis of six novels representing early twentieth-century and contemporary literary fiction in these cultures, Layoun illuminates the networks of power in which genre migration and its interpretations have been implicated. She also examines the social and cultural practice of constructing and maintaining narratives, not only within books but outside of them as well. In each of the three cultural traditions, the literary debates surrounding the adoption and adaption of the modern novel focus on problematic formulations of the "modern" versus the "traditional," the "Western" and "foreign" versus the "indigenous," and notions of the modern bourgeois subject versus the pre-capitalist or pre-colonial subject. Layoun textually situates and analyzes these formulations in the early twentieth-century novels of Alexandros Papadiamandis (Greece), Yahya Haqqi (Egypt), and Natsume Soseki (Japan) and in the contemporary novels of Dimitris Hatzis (Greece), Ghassan Kanafani (Palestine), and Oe Kenzaburo (Japan) |
| Analysis |
Arabic fiction History |
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Greek fiction History |
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Japanese fiction History |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages [259]-268) and index |
| Subject |
Comparative literature -- Asian and European
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Comparative literature -- European and Asian
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Comparative literature -- European and Oriental
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Comparative literature -- Oriental and European
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Fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism.
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| LC no. |
89039388 |
| ISBN |
0691068348 (alk. paper) |
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