'This is a strong book in all the important ways. It is learned, conceptually sophisticated, critically sensitive, judicious and thoughtful throughout, lucidly presented, and well written. One only occasionally finds this combination. It definitely makes a contribution to the contemporary discussion of world literature. This is an outstanding piece of work.'
Walter Cohen, University of Michigan
'A work of scholarship should promise new knowledge as well as new interpretations, and this is a work that does just that, and in more than one way. It will enrich and inspire the discourse on world literature. There is nothing out there that is quite like it.'
Bruce Robbins, Columbia University
Develops a new, "spectral" theory of world literature, and a comparative understanding of the history and current practice of the novel in the Middle East
This book draws on Edward Said, Aamir Mufti, Jacques Derrida, and world-systems theory to address the institutionalized construct of "world literature" from its origins in Goethe and Marx to the present day. It argues that through its history, this construct has served to incorporate if not annul local literatures and the concept of "local literature" itself, and to universalize the novel, the lyric poem, and the stage play as the only literary forms appropriate to modernity. It demonstrates this thesis through a comparative reading of the reinscription of the classical Arabic-Islamic concept of "adab" as "literature" in the modern, European sense in Egypt, Turkey, and Iran in the 19th to mid-20th centuries. It then turns to the Middle Eastern novel in the global contexts of its production, translation, circulation, and reception today. Through new readings of novels and other literary works by Abdelrahman Munif, Naguib Mahfouz, Orhan Pamuk, Azar Nafisi, Yasmin Crowther, and Marjane Satrapi, and with reference to landmarks of Middle Eastern and world literary history ranging from the Mu'allaqat and Alf Layla wa Layla to Don Quixote, it argues that these texts - like "world literature" itself - are constitutively haunted by specters of the literary forms and traditions, of the life-worlds that they expressed, cast aside by modernity. In the case of the Middle Eastern novel, it is adab and all that it encompassed in the classical Arab-Islamic world that is suppressed or othered, but that spectral, yet returns in new, genuinely worldly constellations of form.
Karim Mattar is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is a transdisciplinary humanist, and his research and teaching interests are focused around world literature, the history of the novel, the Middle East, the Israel / Palestine conflict, and critical theory. With Anna Ball, he is the co-editor of The Edinburgh Companion to the Postcolonial Middle East (Edinburgh University Press, 2019).
Cover image: The Ambassadors, Hans Holbein the Younger, 1533, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
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ISBN: 978-1-4744-6703-2

Karim Mattar is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is a transdisciplinary humanist, and his research and teaching interests are focused around world literature, the history of the novel, the Middle East, the Israel / Palestine conflict, and critical theory. With Anna Ball, he is the co-editor of The Edinburgh Companion to the Postcolonial Middle East (Edinburgh University Press, 2019).

Preface; Acknowledgements; Note on Transliterations; Introduction: Towards a Spectral Theory of World Literature; Part I: The Worlding of "Literature" in the Middle East; 1. The Shaba¿ of Modernity: World-Systems, the Petro-Imperium, and the Indigenous Trace; 2. A Genealogy of Adab in the Comparative Middle East; Part II: The Middle Eastern Novel and the Spectral Life-World of Modernity; 3. The Revolution of Form: Naguib Mahfouz from the Suez Crisis to the Arab Spring; 4. Islam and the Limits of Translation: Orhan Pamuk and the Ottoman Revival; 5. Women in the Literary Marketplace: The Anglophone Iranian Novel and the Feminist Subject; Conclusion. Futures of Spectrality; Bibliography; Index.