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Sexuality, nationalism and the other: the Arabic literary canon between orientalism and the Nah?a discourse at the Fin de Siècle

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journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-09, 23:07 authored by Feras AlkabaniFeras Alkabani
This article examines the dual and paradoxical conception of the Arabic literary canon in Orientalist and Nah?a discourses in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—an era of great change and closer mutual cultural awareness between Europe and the Arab world. What Arabic literature had long signified to European scholars since Antoine Galland’s eighteenth-century translation of The Arabian Nights (mysticism, Romanticism and a platform to explore sexual taboos) was very different from how the nationalist-minded Nah?a intellectuals wanted to reconfigure it as the hallmark of the rational “Golden Age” of Arab civilization. Sexuality became a site of contestation between certain Orientalists who praised Arab literary “frankness” and an anxious class of Arab scholars who wanted to “cleanse” the Arabic literary canon and reconfigure it in line with modern, European standards of “respectability” and “politeness.”

History

Publication status

  • Published

File Version

  • Accepted version

Journal

Middle Eastern Literatures

ISSN

1475-2638

Publisher

Routledge

Issue

3

Volume

23

Page range

111-139

Department affiliated with

  • Sussex Centre for Language Studies Publications

Full text available

  • Yes

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2021-02-22

First Open Access (FOA) Date

2022-11-11

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2021-02-19

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