Sexuality, nationalism and the other: the Arabic literary canon between orientalism and the Nah?a discourse at the Fin de Siècle
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 LiteraturesISSN
1475-2638Publisher
RoutledgeExternal DOI
Issue
3Volume
23Page range
111-139Department affiliated with
- Sussex Centre for Language Studies Publications
Full text available
- Yes
Peer reviewed?
- Yes
Legacy Posted Date
2021-02-22First Open Access (FOA) Date
2022-11-11First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date
2021-02-19Usage metrics
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