Description
Book SynopsisMiddle Eastern Gothics is the first scholarly volume on Gothic literature from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Its nine chapters consider literary expressions of the Gothic in the major Middle Eastern languages – Arabic, Hebrew, Persian and Turkish. Spanning the Maghreb, the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Egypt and Palestine, the book makes a case for the transnational region – a cohesive geographic space encompassing diverse cultures, languages and histories that parallel, intersect or overlap – as a crucial locus of Gothic Studies, alongside the nation, the globe or the hyper-local. Across the MENA region, the Gothic helps express ongoing literary negotiations with modernity, leaving its distinctive mark on representations of globalisation, colonialism and nationalism. At the same time, Middle Eastern literary texts expand the boundaries of the mode on their own terms, refracting broad histories through local and indigenous forms, figures and narratives that we might associate with the Gothic.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors Notes on Transliteration Introduction: (Re-)Orienting the Gothic - Karen Grumberg Part I. Tracing the Gothic in Middle Eastern Literatures 1. Maqāmāt: Towards the Middle Eastern Gothic of the War on Terror - Jacob Berman 2. The Iranian Gothic and its Parts - Michael Beard Part II. Spectralised Modernities 3. Gothicising the Ottoman Past and Building Modern Turkey in Turkish Novels of the 1920s - Tuğçe Bıçakçı Syed 4. Revival and Decay: On the Politics of Gothic Ambivalences in Modern Hebrew Literature - Roni Masel 5. Efendi Gothic: A Forgotten Prehistory of the Arabic Novel - Alexandra Shraytekh (Chreiteh) 6. The Call of Kimya: Re-Writing Sufi Ghosts in Ahmet Ümit’s The Dervish Gate - Adriana Raducanu Part III. Violence, Catastrophe, Trauma: Gothic Literalised 7. Saharan Gothic: Desert Necrofiction in Maghrebi and Middle Eastern Desert Literature - Brahim El Guabli 8. ‘Well-Founded Fear’: Dead Narrators, Displaced Authors in Iraqi Gothic Fiction - Federico Pozzoli
