Occidentalism and the Egyptian Novel: Politics, Poetics and Modernity

＂This book examines Occidentalism, or the set of cultural, literary and political meanings associated with ’the West’, in the works of canonical 20th- 21st-century Egyptian novelists. Beginning with the writings of Muhammad Husayn Haykal, Lorenzo Casini here traces the way that imaginations and representations of the West became bound up with notions of modernity and national identity with which Egyptian novelists grappled, from the works of Tawfiq al-Hakim to those of Taha Husayn. He argues that later novelists such as Yusuf Idris, Fati Ghanim, and Latifa al-Zayyat, reacted to the changing political circumstances in Egypt, from Nasser’s rule and the slide to authoritarianism to the 2011 Revolution, to imagine different kinds of Egyptian political community with a more complicated and less binary relationship with the imagined West＂--

Lorenzo Casini is Associate Professor of Arabic Language and Literature at the University of Messina, Italy. He is the co- author of Fuori degli argini (2003) and Modernità arabe (2012) and the co-editor of Minnena (2020) andMigration in the Making of the Gulf Space (2022).