Global Arab Fiction

Global Arab Fiction explores twenty-first-century fiction set in north and east Africa, the Gulf, the Arab east, and diaspora, showing diversity and connections across Arab world contexts. Nadia Atia and Lindsey Moore draw on a substantial literary corpus, highlighting contemporary trends in what is available to Anglophone audiences and considering how Arab fiction circulates as a global commodity.

Global Arab Fiction begins by positioning the Arab novel as a global phenomenon. It also explores the influence of literary prizes, notably the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, on the enhanced international visibility of Arab fiction this century. The authors tackle the thorny issue of violence, in representing Arab world contexts, and spotlight queer Arab desire, identity, and community. They address the rise of speculative Arab literary modes and show how both mobility and immobility challenge a global paradigm.

Global Arab Fiction illuminates a vibrant body of literature rooted in, but not circumscribed by, a region redefined by twenty-first-century global geopolitics. This book offers new arguments about twenty-first-century Arab literary tropes, modes, consecration routes, identities, and contexts. It is unmissable for readers interested in contemporary, postcolonial, Arab/Middle Eastern, and world literary studies.

Nadia Atia is Reader in Postcolonial and Global Literature in the Department of English at Queen Mary University of London, UK. Her current research examines representations of home in diasporic Iraqi fiction, queer sexualities in Arab writing and crime and other Arab ’genre’ fiction.

Lindsey Moore is Reader in Postcolonial Literatures in the Department of English Literature and Creative Writing at Lancaster University, UK. Her current research is on Palestinian literature in English and on literary and other ways of countermapping urban Palestine.