<i>Female Voices and Egyptian Independence</i> provides a fascinating account of how British and Egyptian authors looked to creatively imagine marginalized voices in the context of colonial Egypt. Rich in contextual and historical detail, the book engagingly contends with the experience and aftermath of revolutionary culture.

Anastasia Valassopoulos, University of Manchester, UK.

Rania Mahmoud offers an astute analysis of marginalized female characters in four seminal Arab and English novels. Her systematic reading uncovers hitherto under-evaluated voices, highlights their importance to the general architecture of the literary works, and convincingly manages to give them more space. A stimulating novel interpretation, with insightful discussions of the genre of the bildungsroman.

Dina Heshmat, Associate Professor, The American University in Cairo, Egypt.

This engaging book seamlessly draws on the literary, the historical, and the political to empower silenced female voices in classical and contemporary fiction. Skillfully, Rania M. Mahmoud reconstructs fragmented narratives and provides fascinating insights into complex human responses to colonial violence and the exclusion built into the nation-building project in modern Egypt.

Hussam R. Ahmed, Professor, Carleton University, Canada.

This book offers a nuanced analysis of the ways in which Egyptian and British novels represent the Egyptian nationalist project in its struggle against British hegemony in the aftermath of two revolutions: the 1881-82 Urabi Revolution, known for inaugurating the British occupation of Egypt, and the 1919 Revolution celebrated in Egyptian national memory as the classic Egyptian revolution par excellence. Reading the novels against the grain, the study recovers female voices that are multiply marginalized, due to their gender and/or ethnicity, whether by colonial imperial powers, the nation, their immediate regional community or, finally, by the works under discussion themselves. Using a comparative lens, the study foregrounds the ways in which the authors confirm, critique, rewrite/revise, or reject developmental narratives. Female Voices and Egyptian Independence pays particular attention to women that range from the uneducated black slave, to the uneducated rural Siwan woman with artistic talent, to the wealthy cultured Coptic housewife, to the rising late nineteenth-century British female professional, and finally to the eclipsed twentieth-century Egyptian female national intellectual, all of whom play crucial roles in the journeys of the respective male protagonists, and by extension, the Egyptian national project.
Les mer

1. Introduction
2. Egypt the Grotesque: Breaking Leila’s Shackle in Lawrence Durrell’s Mountolive
3. Lessons in Modernity: Naguib Mahfouz’s Sugar Street and the Female National Intellectual
4. Alice in Wonderland: Egypt and the Benevolent Empire in The Guns of El Kebir
5. The Women of Mahmoud’s Dreams: Bahaa Taher’s Sunset Oasis and the National Mosaic
6. Conclusion

Les mer
An analysis of the role of women in fictional representations of the early Egyptian national movement.
Of interdisciplinary appeal to the fields of Arabic and comparative literature, Middle East studies, postcolonial studies, gender studies

Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9780755651047
Publisert
2024-01-25
Utgiver
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC; I.B. Tauris
Vekt
440 gr
Høyde
238 mm
Bredde
164 mm
Dybde
16 mm
Aldersnivå
P, 06
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Innbundet
Antall sider
192

Forfatter

Om bidragsyterne

Rania M. Mahmoud is Assistant Professor, Department of World Languages, Literatures and Cultures, University of Arkansas, USA. Her writing has appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as Gender & History, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Middle Eastern Literatures and Arab Studies Quarterly.