SOAS Research Online

Abstract

Mad love in the Arabic novel is an expression of the anxiety surrounding Arabic novel's search for form. It is symptomatic of nostalgia for the future that, in the absence of a viable trajectory in the Arab world's disappointment in the nation-state and modernisation, retreats into the past, arguing with it and looking in it for a resolution for the love triangle it creates for nation-state, modernity and tradition. This book uncovers the politics of nostalgia inherent in the Arabic novel, places these in the context of the birth of the Arabic novel in the intercultural networks of exchange between East and West, past and present, and traces them to the discourses on aesthetics, ethics and politics relevant to cultural and literary transformations of the Arabic speaking world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Nostalgia and madness are the tropes through which the Arabic novel writes its own history as a story of grappling with and resisting the hegemony of both the state and tradition.