Description
Book SynopsisThe ups and downs of silk, cotton and stocks synchopated with serialized novels in the late nineteenth-century Arabic press; time itself was changing. Khalīl al-Khūrī, Salīm al-Bustānī, and Jurjī Zaydān wrote novels of debt, dissimulation, and risk, increasingly legible as tools of French and British empire.
Trade Review"Compelling, inventive, and brilliantly argued, Elizabeth Holt's Fictitious Capital immediately becomes required reading. Linking literary history to financial speculation, modes of consumption, the development of the press in Arabic, the emergence of the book as a modern form, and the changing forms of language and writing in this period, this book has implications for virtually all of the fields within Arabic studies, and beyond, as it changes the ways in which we think about language, reading, modernity, and economy." -- -Jeffrey Sacks University of California, Riverside "In this meticulously researched study, Elizabeth Holt offers a much needed reassessment of the nineteenth century Arabic cultural movement known as 'al-nahdah' (revival). Her focus on the linkages between fiction publication and commerce underlines the foundational contributions made by Syro-Lebanese intellectuals in the earliest development of modern Arabic fiction that have continued into the twentieth century and beyond." -- -Roger Allen University of Pennsylvania
