A wide-ranging exploration of the relationship between history and literature
This issue of Alif explores the relationship between literature and history. What do history and literature have to say to each other? What can literature say that history cannot, and vice versa? Do they work with or against each other? How does the literary dimension of history affect its status, and how does the historicity of literature, in turn, shape its being? What would it mean to speak of a "literariness of history" today? The terms "literature" and "history" in our title are intended to be construed in the broadest possible sense and to cover the widest possible range of genres and modalities of literary and historical writing. The recent proliferation of epithets and sub-disciplines in the study of both literature and history has fundamentally changed both fields while raising further questions about the possibility of scholarly debates that traverse them.
Contributors
- Balthazar I. Beckett, American University in Cairo, Cairo, Egypt
- Mohamed Birairi, Beni-Suef University, Beni-Suef, Egypt, and the American University in Cairo, Cairo, Egypt
- Ziad Dallal, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, USA
- Karim Elsaiad, Cairo University, Cairo, Egypt
- Itzea Goikolea-Amiano, SOAS, University of London, London, UK
- Rebecca Ruth Gould, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK
- Magdi Guirguis, Kafrelsheikh University, Kafr al-Sheikh, Egypt
- Isabelle Hesse, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia
- Abdullah Ibrahim, literary critic
- Madonna Kalousian, independent scholar
- Céza Kassem, independent scholar
- Ahmed F. Khaleel, University of York, York, UK
- Tarif Khalidi, American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon
- Peter Kornicki, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
- Wen-chi Li, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
- Azza Madian, Cairo Conservatoire and American University in Cairo, Cairo, Egypt
- Francesca Orsini, SOAS, University of London, London, UK
- Daniel Rivet, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris, France
- Anne C. Vila, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin, USA

English and French Section:
Editorial
Anne C. Vila: Shaking Up the Enlightenment: Jansenist Convulsionnaires and Their Witnesses in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Paris
Rebecca Ruth Gould: The Antiquarian Imagination in Multilingual Daghestan
Balthazar I. Beckett: "Like a Butterfly on a Pin": Witnessing Genealogies of Whiteness in James Baldwin's "Going to Meet the Man"
Madonna Kalousian: Between Invertible and Invertebrate Histories: The Evolution of Rachid Boudjedra's Snail-Man
Ziad Dallal: Chronicles of the Mundane and the Eternal Present: Literary Montage in Dh¿t and K¿na ghadan
Wen-chi Li: Transgressing Hegemonic Discourses: Yang Mu, the Poet-Historian, and His Minor Narratives
Isabelle Hesse: Counterfactual Israels: Zionism, Nation-Building, and Indigeneity in Contemporary Jewish Writing
Daniel Rivet: La littérature élargissant la connaissance de l'histoire
Francesca Orsini and Peter Kornicki: East and South Asian Perspectives on History, Languages, and Literatures: A Conversation
English Abstracts of Articles
English Notes on Contributors
Arabic Section:
Editorial
Céza Kassem: History and the Novel: Introduction and Analytical Overview
Tarif Khalidi: Writing Pre-Modern Arab History: Introductory Critical Approach
Magdi Guirguis: Arab Traditions in the Writing of Coptic History
Itzea Goikolea-Amiano: Al-Andalus in Spanish-Ruled Morocco: Politics of Prestige and Circularity of History in Al-Mu'tamid and Ketama
Ahmed F. Khaleel: World War II in the Poetry of Muhammad Mahdi al-Jawahiri
Abdullah Ibrahim: Narrative Dreams and History
Karim Elsaiad: Being-towards-Apocalypse: An Ontological-Historical Analysis of Mäar's Poetry
Mohamed Birairi: Intertextuality between Sunset Oasis and Cairo Swan Song: A Reading of Two Egyptian Colonial Periods
Azza Madian: Musical Orientalism: Two Studies from the early 1800s between Contemporary Performance Practices and Early Manuscripts
Arabic Abstracts of Articles
Arabic Notes on Contributors

Ziad Elmarsafy is professor of comparative literature at King's College, London. He has published widely on Arabic and French literature and culture, especially at the intersection of literature and religion. His most recent book is Esoteric Islam in Modern French Thought: Massignon, Corbin, Jambet (2021).