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E-book
Author Johnson, Rebecca C

Title Stranger Fictions A History of the Novel in Arabic Translation
Published Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2021

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Description 1 online resource (287 p.)
Contents Stranger Fictions -- Contents -- List of Figures -- Acknowledgments -- Note on Translation and Transliteration -- Introduction: A History of the Novel in Mistranslation -- Part One: Reading in Translation -- 1. Crusoe's Babel, Missionaries' Mistakes: Translated Origins of the Arabic Novel -- 2. Stranger Publics: The Structural Translation of the Print Sphere -- 3. Errant Readers: The Serialized Novel's Modern Subject -- Part Two: The Transnational Imagination -- 4. Fictions of Connectivity: Dumas's World in Translation
5. The Novel in the Age of the Comparative World Picture: Jules Verne's Colonial Worlds -- 6. The Melodramatic State: Popular Translation and the Erring Nation -- Conclusion: Invader Fictions: National Literature after Translation -- Notes -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z
Summary Widely cited as the first Arabic novel, Zaynab appeared in 1913. Yet over the previous eight decades, hundreds of novels translated into Arabic from English and French were published, creating a vast literary corpus that influenced generations of writers across the Arabic world but that has, until now, been considered only as a curious footnote in the genre's history. In Stranger Fictions, Rebecca C. Johnson offers a transformative new account of modern Arabic literature by incorporating these works into the history the Arabic novel. Considering the wide range of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century translation practices--including "bad translation," mistranslation, and pseudo-translation--Johnson argues that the circulation of European novels and genres in the Arabic world, and the multiple translation practices that enabled it, form the conceptual and practical foundations of Arab literary modernity, which includes the development of Middle Eastern print culture, the cultivation of a reading public, the standardization of Modern Arabic, and the establishment of modern literary canons. Taking readers chronologically through nearly a century of translations published in Beirut, Cairo, Malta, Paris, London, and New York, from the 1835 publication of Qisòsòat Rūbinsòun Kurūzī (The Story of Robinson Crusoe) to translated and pastiched crime stories appearing in the early twentieth-century Egyptian magazines, Stranger Fictions affirms the central place of translation and mistranslation not only in the history of the novel in Arabic but of the novel as a transnational form itself
Notes Description based upon print version of record
Subject Arabic fiction -- European influences
Arabic fiction -- 1801- -- History and criticism
Translating and interpreting.
HISTORY / Europe / France.
Arabic fiction.
Translating and interpreting.
Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9781501753305
1501753304