LAUSR

At first glance the length of The Oxford Handbook of Arab Novelistic Traditions may seem daunting to even the most enthusiastic of readers. But this is not just a casual overview of the subject, suitable for whiling away a lazy afternoon. It offers a timely look at major developments during the past several decades concerning scholarship produced about the Arabic novel. For anyone with more than a passing interest in the fortunes of the novel genre in modern Arab society and culture and how it got to the place of primacy it holds today, this book will be a resource to return to again and again. It will repay those who have the opportunity to read, re-read, compare and reflect on its major essays for decades to come. The editor of the volume, Professor Hassan, is to be commended for keeping it focused on the major trends, as he sees them, in the study of modern Arabic fiction, while at the same time giving his contributors maximum leeway to produce meaningful interpretations of their subject matter. Hassan establishes how inclusive and exclusionary impulses have interacted in the study of Arab novelistic traditions very clearly in the introduction to the Handbook. He speaks of “the novel” as having “played an important role in consolidating national identities,” à la Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities (6), but he also shows how it frequently became the vehicle for expressing heterogeneous strands within “[e]thnic, racial, linguistic, religious, and other minorities” (9) that challenged the national clichés of homogenization. Parts II (“Developments” in 21 Arabic-speaking countries, from Algeria to Mauritania to Yemen) and III (“Diasporas” in 13 additional countries, from Argentina to the Netherlands to the United States) provide major evidence for the contributors’ contention that Arab novelistic traditions cannot be reduced to single, univocal phenomenon. Hassan’s major focus in the introduction may be on nomenclature and the organization of the entire volume, but he also argues that the “standard account” of the development of the novel in Arabic places it as “a sign of MESA R o M E S 53 2 2019